what's new in swift

Asked on 2024-07-30

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What's New in Swift

Overview

Swift has reached a significant milestone, celebrating its 10th anniversary. Over the years, Swift has evolved to become a powerful, safe, and expressive programming language, suitable for a wide range of applications from app development to system programming.

Key Updates in Swift 6

  1. New Language Mode: Swift 6 introduces a new language mode that provides data race safety, enhancing the safety guarantees for concurrent programs.
  2. Non-Copyable Types: Swift 6 introduces non-copyable types, which are not copyable by default, providing more control over memory management.
  3. Embedded Swift: A new language subset called Embedded Swift is introduced, designed to run on highly constrained systems.
  4. Concurrency Improvements: Significant improvements in data race checking and concurrency model, including complete concurrency checking in Swift 5.10.
  5. C++ Interoperability: Enhanced interoperability with C++, making it easier to integrate Swift with existing C++ codebases.
  6. Typed Throws: Introduction of typed throws, allowing functions to specify the types of errors they can throw.
  7. Low-Level Synchronization Primitives: New primitives for low-level synchronization, providing more tools for concurrent programming.

Swift Ecosystem

  • Swift Package Manager: Continues to evolve, supporting a wide range of packages and tools.
  • Cross-Platform Development: Swift is now available on more platforms, including Windows and Linux, with cross-compilation support.
  • Swift Testing: New testing APIs designed for Swift, making it easier to write and maintain tests.

SwiftUI Integration

  • Swift 6 Language Mode: SwiftUI has improved its APIs to make it easier to adopt the new language mode in your apps.
  • Main Actor Isolation: Views in SwiftUI are now evaluated on the main actor, ensuring thread safety by default.

Community and Future Directions

  • GitHub Migration: The Swift project will be moving to a new organization on GitHub, managed by the Swift project.
  • Community Contributions: The community continues to play a vital role in the evolution of Swift, contributing to its growth and development.

For more detailed information, you can watch the session What’s new in Swift.

Relevant Sessions

  1. What’s new in Swift
  2. Platforms State of the Union
  3. What’s new in SwiftUI

Feel free to ask if you need more specific details or timestamps!