What's new in Swift 6?

Swift 6 introduces several significant improvements and new features 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 incrementally, module by module. The compiler will diagnose concurrent access to memory, allowing developers to fix data race issues with minimal changes to their code. (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 such as operating system kernels and microcontrollers. (What’s new in Swift)

4. Swift Testing: An all-new testing framework named Swift Testing is introduced, which has expressive APIs that make it simple to write tests. (Platforms State of the Union)

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

6. Concurrency Improvements: There are several improvements to concurrency, including better data race checking and enhancements to the concurrency model introduced in previous versions. (What’s new in Swift)

7. C++ Interoperability: Swift 6 continues to improve interoperability with C++, making it easier to integrate Swift with existing C++ codebases. (What’s new in Swift)

8. Typed Throws: This feature allows functions to specify the types of errors they can throw, making error handling more predictable and type-safe. (What’s new in Swift)

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