[fake44637]

Here are my results on a Debian jessie box:

If you just want to play with the REPL (usr/bin/swift in the Ubuntu 14.04 snapshot), all you have to do is:

  apt-get install python-dev

If you want to actually compile swift files (usr/bin/swiftc in the Ubuntu 14.04 snapshot), it appears extremely basic programs will compile with jessie's clang-3.5, so all you have to do is:

  apt-get install clang

Note that the swift.org instructions claim you need clang-3.6, and you probably do for more complex programs. For that, you'll need to temporarily add a sid/unstable source and upgrade clang:

  echo 'deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ unstable main' >> /etc/apt/sources.list
  apt-get update
  apt-get install clang

(don't forget to remove the unstable line afterwards).

[fake44637]

so actually I'm running into the following error anytime I try to compile something using swiftc with clang-3.6 installed:

  <unknown>:0: error: opening import file for module 'SwiftShims': No such file or directory