When introduced in 2014, Swift didn't come with a package manager. Later, Swift Package Manager was created as an official Apple open-source project, and this solution has continued to develop and mature. Our teams rely increasingly on SwiftPM because most packages can be included through it and the processes for both creators and consumers of packages have been streamlined. In the previous Radar, we recommended trialing, but we now believe it makes sense to select it as the default when starting new projects. For existing projects using tools like CocoaPods or Carthage, it might be worth a quick experiment to gauge the level of effort to migrate and to check whether all dependencies are available.
Some programming languages, especially newer ones, have a package and dependency management solution built in. When it was introduced in 2014, Swift didn't come with a package manager, and so the macOS and iOS developer community simply kept using CocoaPods and Carthage, the third-party solutions that had been created for Objective-C. A couple of years later Swift Package Manager (SwiftPM) was started as an official Apple open-source project, and it then took another few years before Apple added support for it to Xcode. Even at that point, though, many development teams continued to use CocoaPods and Carthage, mostly because many packages were simply not available via SwiftPM. Now that most packages can be included via SwiftPM and processes have been further streamlined for both creators and consumers of packages, our teams are increasingly relying on SwiftPM.
