Please support older macOS/iOS versions

[danschlet]

Hi,

Is there a technical reason why only quite new macOS/iOS versions (macOS 13.3 and iOS 16.4) are supported in the Swift Packages? I thought because your great code is pure Swift and doesn't have dependencies on AppKit/UIKit/Foundation that I should be able to use it with older OS versions as well.

Supporting only new OS versions is a major issue for software which must be compatible with older Macs and iOS devices, which are very common for example in education settings. Currently we're still supporting macOS 10.13 and iOS 12 and even though heavily relying on AppKit/UIKit, this works great also with Swift code.

Thank you for an answer/considering our request.

Kind regards,
Daniel

[tayloraswift]

the “technical” reason is that the library (or one of its infrastructural dependencies) uses Swift language features that are only supported on newer versions of macOS. however, i don’t remember off the top of my head what those language features are, only that those platform version minimums were needed at one point in order to compile the package successfully on macOS.

what errors do you get if you lower or remove the platform versions?

[stackotter]

This swift-hash PR (now merged 🎉) should make it possible to fix this issue