Swift 4.1 Enhances Generics, Compiler Optimizations, and Package Manager
Swift 4.1 is now officially available, bringing new language features, build options, and a few enhancements to the Swift Package Manager and Foundation.
Swift 4.2 Enters Final Development Stage, Paving the Way for Swift 5
With Swift 4.1 being close to its official release in Xcode 9.3, currently available in beta, the Swift team is now focusing on the next version of the language, Swift 4.2. Besides including bug fixes and improvements to compile-time performance, the new version will further advance work on ABI stability.
Apple Open Source SwiftNIO, a Low-Level Non-Blocking I/O Framework for Swift
At the recent try! Swift Conference in Tokyo, Apple announced the SwiftNIO project, a Netty-like non-blocking cross-platform I/O framework written in Swift.
Swift 4.1 Brings Conditional Conformance and More
Swift 4.1, available in Xcode 9.3, brings a number of improvements to the language, including automatic implementation of the Equatable and Hashable protocols, conditional conformance, and more.
Swift Has Got Its Discussion Forum
The Swift team has announced the migration of several Swift mailing lists to the Swift Forums, which will be the primary discussion and communication method from now on.
Apple Getting Ready to Deprecate 32-Bit macOS Apps
Apple has started preparing the deprecation of 32-bit apps for macOS. The next maintenance release of macOS, High Sierra 10.13.4, will notify users when they launch 32-bit apps, while the upcoming Xcode 9.3 will include tools to make the transition to 64-bit less painful for developers.
Apple Open-Sourced the iOS Kernel for ARM CPUs
Apple has quietly made available arm and arm64-specific files on its GitHub XNU-darwin repository. While this may not be interesting to all developers, it still enables interesting possibilities for security researchers and others.
Swift 4 is Officially Available: What's New
Swift’s latest major release contains many changes and updates to the language and the standard library, most notably new String features, extended collections, archival and serialization, and more.
Swift 5 Sets its Goals, Defines New Evolution Process
Expected to be released in late 2018, Swift 5 will bring ABI stability and further work on API resilience and memory ownership. A new evolution process will help ensure Swift 5 development keeps its focus on its planned goals.
Apple Open-Sources the Swift Language Migrator
Apple has open-sourced the Swift 4 migrator that is included in Xcode 9, recently announced at WWDC 2017.
Swift 3.1 Improves Language, Package Manager, and Linux Implementation
Staying true to its plan, the recently announced Swift 3.1 is source compatible with Swift 3.0. Still, it includes a number of changes to the language, the standard library, and improved Linux implementation.
Swift Memory Ownership Manifesto
According to Chris Lattner, Swift creator and Swift team lead before moving to Tesla, defining a Rust/Cyclone-inspired memory ownership model is one of the main goals for Swift development. Now that Swift 4 has entered its phase 2, the Swift team has published a manifesto detailing how Swift memory ownership could work.
Swift 4 Enters Final Stage, Defers ABI Stability
Apple has detailed the release process for Swift 4, which should become available in the Fall of 2017. The main focus of this release is to provide significant enhancements to the core language and standard library, while delivering source compatibility. ABI compatibility, which was originally in the roadmap, will be deferred, explains Apples' new Swift team lead Ted Kremenek.
The Road to Swift 4 ABI Stability
Recently published on the swift-evolution mailing list, the Swift ABI Stability Manifesto aims to be a compilation of all concerns that need to be addressed before Swift’s ABI can be declared stable. Yet, it is not entirely clear whether ABI stability will make it into Swift 4.
Swift 3.1 Enters its Final Development Stage
Apple’s Swift team has made public their release plan for Swift 3.1, expected to be available in the Spring of 2017 and source-compatible with Swift 3.0, writes Apple’s language and runtimes manager Ted Kremenek.
