what's new in swift 6

Swift 6 introduces several new features and improvements aimed at enhancing portability, performance, and the overall developer experience. Here are some of the key updates:

1. Data Race Safety: Swift 6 introduces a new language mode that provides data race safety guarantees, helping developers write correct concurrent programs. This mode is opt-in and can be adopted module by module, allowing for incremental migration (Platforms State of the Union).

2. Non-Copyable Types: Swift 6 introduces non-copyable types, which are types that cannot be copied. This feature helps in managing resources more efficiently and avoiding unintended copies (What’s new in Swift).

3. Embedded Swift: A new language subset called Embedded Swift is introduced, which can run on highly constrained systems like operating system kernels and microcontrollers (What’s new in Swift).

4. Concurrency Improvements: Significant improvements have been made to concurrency, including better data race checking and the ability to pass non-sendable values across active isolation boundaries (What’s new in Swift).

5. Swift Testing: An all-new testing framework named Swift Testing has been introduced. It features expressive APIs that simplify writing tests (Platforms State of the Union).

6. GitHub Organization: Swift will be moving to a new organization on GitHub (swiftlang), which will include the Swift Compiler foundation and many more Swift ecosystem packages (What’s new in Swift).

7. Improved Interoperability: Enhancements have been made to Swift's interoperability with C and C++, making it easier to integrate Swift into existing codebases (What’s new in Swift).

8. Typed Throws: Swift 6 introduces typed throws, allowing functions to specify the types of errors they can throw, improving error handling (What’s new in Swift).

For a detailed overview, you can watch the session What’s new in Swift.