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SWIFT GATES RUNTIME VARS, KOTLIN DROPS GRADLE 8.13
By RepoJournal · Filed · About Mobile platforms
Swift's runtime now ignores safety-disabling environment variables in privileged processes, and JetBrains is cutting Kotlin's Gradle support at the knees.
Swift's runtime now ignores SWIFT_* environment variables in setuid/setgid binaries, and in platform-binary or hardened-runtime executables it will also skip variables that disable safety checks [1]. This is a hard security win for anyone shipping privileged Swift tooling. Meanwhile, Kotlin is shedding test code for Gradle 8.9 through 8.13 in four separate PRs [2][3][4][5], a signal that the build system is moving on. Flutter's tooling got three Windows fixes: UNC path resolution in depfile parsing [6], argParser wrap-column handling [7], and a swap of deprecated wstring_convert for native Win32 APIs [8]. The team also unskipped web decoration image lerp tests [9], and Ben Konyi's PR strips synthetic 'type' and 'method' fields from service extension responses [10]. Apple's distributed runtime is getting validation hardening [11], and cxx-interop now honors libkern's return ownership attributes [12]. It's a busy 94 commits and 61 PRs.
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Action items
- → Audit Swift runtime consumers for SWIFT_* env var reliance; update if you run setuid or hardened binaries apple/swift [immediate]
- → Plan to drop Gradle 8.13 and older from Kotlin build matrix JetBrains/kotlin [plan]
- → Monitor Flutter's Windows tooling fixes if you hit UNC path or wrap-column issues flutter/flutter [monitor]
References
- [1] [Runtime] Gate SWIFT_* environment variables on process privilege. ↗ apple/swift
- [2] [Gradle] Drop test code for Gradle 8.13 JetBrains/kotlin
- [3] [Gradle] Drop test code for Gradle 8.11 and 8.12 JetBrains/kotlin
- [4] [Gradle] Drop test code for Gradle 8.10 JetBrains/kotlin
- [5] [Gradle] Drop test code for Gradle 8.9 JetBrains/kotlin
- [6] [flutter_tools] Fix UNC path resolution in depfile parsing on Windows (#191265) flutter/flutter
- [7] [flutter_tools] Update argParser usageLineLength when --wrap-column is passed (#191264) flutter/flutter
- [8] [FML] Replace deprecated wstring_convert with Win32 APIs (#191394) flutter/flutter
- [9] [web] Unskip decoration image lerp tests (#191426) flutter/flutter
- [10] Do not inject 'type' and 'method' into service extension responses (#190946) flutter/flutter
- [11] [Distributed] More validations in distributed runtime entry calls ↗ apple/swift
- [12] [cxx-interop] Honor libkern's return ownership attributes ↗ apple/swift