what new in swift

Generated on 8/5/2024

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What's New in Swift

Swift's 10th Anniversary

This year marks the 10th anniversary of Swift, a language that has revolutionized how productive and expressive APIs can be. Swift's safety, speed, and approachability, combined with built-in C and C++ interoperability, make it a compelling choice for performance-sensitive and secure code.

Swift 6

Swift 6 introduces several new features and improvements:

Data Race Safety: Swift 6 introduces a new language mode that achieves data race safety, expanding Swift's safety guarantees to concurrent programs.
Embedded Swift: A new language subset called Embedded Swift can run on highly constrained systems.
Non-Copyable Types: Swift 6 introduces non-copyable types, which are not copyable by default, enhancing memory management and performance.
Typed Throws: This feature allows functions to specify the types of errors they can throw, making error handling more predictable and type-safe.
Low-Level Synchronization Primitives: New primitives for low-level synchronization are introduced to help developers write more efficient concurrent code.

Swift Evolution and Community

Swift continues to evolve through a community-driven process. The Swift project is moving to a new organization on GitHub, which will include the Swift Compiler foundation and many more ecosystem packages.

SwiftUI Enhancements

SwiftUI has gained numerous customizations to fine-tune the look and feel of apps. New features include:

Custom Containers: Allowing for more flexible UI designs.
Mesh Gradients: Enabling more complex and visually appealing gradients.
Scrolling Customizations: Providing fine-grained control over scroll views.
Custom Animations: You can now set up animations on UIKit or AppKit views and drive them with SwiftUI.

Swift Data

Swift Data helps model and persist app information using a lightweight API that feels natural in Swift. This allows developers to define their schema with minimal code.

Swift Testing

New Swift testing APIs are designed to be dramatically easier to use, making developers more productive.

Swift Assist

Swift Assist, available later this year, will include predictive completion for Apple Silicon Macs, enhancing the developer experience in Xcode.

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

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What’s new in SwiftUI

Learn how you can use SwiftUI to build great apps for any Apple platform. Explore a fresh new look and feel for tabs and documents on iPadOS. Improve your window management with new windowing APIs, and gain more control over immersive spaces and volumes in your visionOS apps. We’ll also take you through other exciting refinements that help you make expressive charts, customize and layout text, and so much more.

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.

Platforms State of the Union 5-Minute Recap

Watch a quick recap of the newest advancements on Apple platforms.

Platforms State of the Union

Discover the newest advancements on Apple platforms.

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.