provide a short history of the recent changes to swift relating to concurrency
Generated on 8/3/2024
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Swift has seen significant changes in its concurrency model over the past few years, particularly with the introduction and evolution of Swift's concurrency features. Here's a brief history of these changes:
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2020: Swift introduced a key feature, the concurrency model, which included
async/await, actors, and structured concurrency. This was a fundamental shift that allowed developers to write safer and more efficient concurrent code. -
2021: The concurrency model was further refined, and distributed actors were introduced, making it easier to build network services. This year also saw the release of the Swift extension for Visual Studio Code, providing a cross-platform editing experience for Swift development.
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Swift 5.10: Achieved data race safety under the complete concurrency checking flag. This version focused on mechanisms to achieve data isolation, such as actors for protecting mutable state and
Sendablefor safe data sharing. -
Swift 6: Introduced the Swift 6 language mode, which provides data race safety guarantees by default. This mode turns all data race issues into compile-time errors, significantly improving app security and reducing debugging time. Swift 6 also includes improvements to data race checking and allows for module-by-module adoption, ensuring compatibility with dependencies that may not yet have migrated to the new language mode.
For more detailed information, you can refer to the following sessions from WWDC 2024:
- What’s new in Swift (26:11)
- Migrate your app to Swift 6 (00:07)
- A Swift Tour: Explore Swift’s features and design (22:32)
These sessions cover the evolution of Swift's concurrency model, the introduction of new features, and practical guidance on migrating to Swift 6.
A Swift Tour: Explore Swift’s features and design
Learn the essential features and design philosophy of the Swift programming language. We’ll explore how to model data, handle errors, use protocols, write concurrent code, and more while building up a Swift package that has a library, an HTTP server, and a command line client. Whether you’re just beginning your Swift journey or have been with us from the start, this talk will help you get the most out of the language.
What’s new in Swift
Join us for an update on Swift. We’ll briefly go through a history of Swift over the past decade, and show you how the community has grown through workgroups, expanded the package ecosystem, and increased platform support. We’ll introduce you to a new language mode that achieves data-race safety by default, and a language subset that lets you run Swift on highly constrained systems. We’ll also explore some language updates including noncopyable types, typed throws, and improved C++ interoperability.
Migrate your app to Swift 6
Experience Swift 6 migration in action as we update an existing sample app. Learn how to migrate incrementally, module by module, and how the compiler helps you identify code that’s at risk of data races. Discover different techniques for ensuring clear isolation boundaries and eliminating concurrent access to shared mutable state.