what's new in swift 6.1

Asked on 2025-03-03

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Swift 6.1 introduces several new features and improvements that enhance the language's capabilities and developer experience. Here are some of the key updates:

  1. Data Race Safety: Swift 6 introduces a new language mode that provides compile-time data race safety. This feature helps diagnose concurrent access to memory, making concurrent programming safer and more reliable. The new language mode is opt-in, allowing developers to adopt it at their own pace (Platforms State of the Union).

  2. Non-Copyable Types: Swift 6 introduces non-copyable types, which suppress the default copyability of Swift types. This is useful for scenarios requiring unique ownership, such as managing system resources like files (What’s new in Swift).

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

  4. Concurrency Improvements: Swift 6 continues to enhance concurrency features, building on async/await and structured concurrency to provide full data race safety (Platforms State of the Union).

  5. Swift Testing Framework: A new testing framework named Swift Testing is introduced, offering expressive APIs to simplify writing tests (Platforms State of the Union).

These updates make Swift 6.1 a significant release, focusing on safety, performance, and expanding the language's applicability to new domains.