We are prebuilding some libraries (mainly with carthage) for some of our projects to reduce development times. These libraries are not updated very often, but we want to update our XCode versions pretty fast.
Now every time a new XCode brings a new swift version, we are seeing this incompatibility issue
File.swift:4:8: error: module compiled with Swift 5.3.2 cannot be imported by the Swift 5.4 compiler: /......./Debug-iphoneos/Alamofire.framework/Modules/Alamofire.swiftmodule/arm64-apple-ios.swiftmodule
How can I pre-build my dependencies in a way that a swift update wont affect it and I dont have to re-build the dependencies with every xcode update (I thought thats what ABI stability was for? How can I activate that?)
It sounds like you're misunderstanding what ABI stability enables. The main benefit is that it allows the OS to include only one version of the Swift standard library, and for all Swift binaries to share it. What you want is "module stability". From the docs on ABI stability:
ABI stability is about mixing versions of Swift at run time. What about compile time? Right now, Swift uses an opaque archive format called “swiftmodule” to describe the interface of a library, such as a framework “MagicKit”, rather than manually-written header files. However, the “swiftmodule” format is also tied to the current version of the compiler, which means an app developer can’t
import MagicKitif MagicKit was built with a different version of Swift. That is, the app developer and the library author have to be using the same version of the compiler.To remove this restriction, the library author needs a feature currently being implemented called module stability. This involves augmenting the opaque format with a textual summary of a module, similar to what you see in Xcodeʼs “Generated Interface” view, so that clients can use a module without having to care what compiler it was built with.
This is not yet supported in any version of Swift.