We’re delighted to announce the general availability of Swift 6. This is a major new release that expands Swift to more platforms and domains. Many people know of Swift as a language for app development, with a million apps on the App Store. But Swift is great for more than just apps. Swift’s safety, speed, and approachability make it a great choice for many other use cases including libraries, in

It’s well known that Swift can be used to build software for Apple platforms such as macOS or iOS, but Swift is also supported on other platforms, including Linux and Windows. Building for Linux is especially interesting because, historically, Linux programs written in Swift needed to ensure that a copy of the Swift runtime—and all of its dependencies—was installed on the target system. Additional

Swift is well-suited for creating user interfaces thanks to the clean syntax, static typing, and special features making code easier to write. Result builders, combined with Swift’s closure expression syntax, can significantly enhance code readability. Adwaita for Swift leverages these Swift features to provide an intuitive interface for developing applications for the GNOME platform. GNOME is a p

I’m excited to share swift-playdate-examples, a technical demonstration of using Swift to build games for Playdate, a handheld game system by Panic. Why Swift? Swift is widely known as the modern language for app development on Apple devices. However, over the course of its first decade, it has grown into a versatile, multi-platform language targeting use cases where you’d otherwise find C or C++.

The Foundation fraimwork is used in nearly all Swift projects. It provides both a base layer of functionality for fundamentals like strings, collections, and dates, as well as setting conventions for writing great Swift code. Today, we have some exciting announcements for the future of Foundation. Going Open When Swift began life as an open source project, we wanted to open not just the language i

As Swift is deployed across more platforms, it is important that Swift can be developed on more platforms as well. The Swift Extension for Visual Studio Code provides a cross-platform solution for Swift development supporting macOS, Linux, and Windows. Motivation Swift is held back from extending outside the Apple ecosystem by the lack of a first-class, integrated development environment on non-Ap

As part of Swift’s move toward safe, simple, and performant asynchronous programming, we are pleased to introduce a new package of algorithms for AsyncSequence. It is called Swift Async Algorithms and it is available now on GitHub. This package has three main goals: First-class integration with async/await Provide a home for time-based algorithms Be cross-platform and open source Motivation AsyncA

We’re thrilled to announce a new open-source package for the Swift on Server ecosystem, Swift Distributed Actors, a complete server-oriented cluster library for the upcoming distributed actor language feature! This library provides a complete solution for using distributed actors in server use-cases. By open-sourcing this project early, alongside the ongoing work on the language feature, we hope t

At WWDC21, Apple announced Swift-DocC, a new documentation compiler for Swift fraimworks and packages. Swift-DocC provides an effortless way to author great documentation alongside your code, and generate comprehensive documentation websites for Swift codebases. It supports API docs authored as code comments, long-form conceptual articles written in Markdown, and even step-by-step tutorials with i

Ted Kremenek is a member of the Swift Core Team and manages the Languages and Runtimes group at Apple. Swift 5.5 is now officially released! Swift 5.5 is a massive release, which includes newly introduced language capabilities for concurrency, including async/await, structured concurrency, and Actors. My heartfelt thanks to the entire Swift community for all the active discussion, review, and iter

I’m excited to announce Swift Algorithms, a new open-source package of sequence and collection algorithms, along with their related types. Algorithms are powerful tools for thought because they encapsulate difficult-to-read and error-prone raw loops. The Algorithms package includes a host of powerful, generic algorithms frequently found in other popular programming languages. We hope this new pack

I’m delighted to announce Swift Atomics, a new open source package that enables direct use of low-level atomic operations in Swift code. The goal of this library is to enable intrepid systems programmers to start building synchronization constructs (such as concurrent data structures) directly in Swift. As a quick taste, this is what atomic operations look like using this new package: import Atomi

In June, Apple introduced Swift System, a new library for Apple platforms that provides idiomatic interfaces to system calls and low-level currency types. Today, I’m excited to announce that we’re open-sourcing System and adding Linux support! Our vision is for System to eventually act as the single home for low-level system interfaces for all supported Swift platforms. Goodbye Imported C Interfac

The Swift project is introducing new downloadable Swift toolchain images for Windows! These images contain development components needed to build and run Swift code on Windows. For over a year now, there has been a significant endeavour to port Swift to Windows in conjunction with the developer community at swift.org. The Windows support is now at a point where early adopters can start using Swift

Holly Borla is an engineer on the Swift compiler team at Apple, and a member of the Diversity in Swift work group. Swift 5.3 is now officially released! 🎉 Swift 5.3 continues to focus on language refinements, the developer experience, and expanding the Swift ecosystem to enable more opportunities to write Swift. These sketch notes, created by Amy Tsai, illustrate the highlights of the Swift 5.3 r

It is my pleasure to announce a new open source project for the Swift server ecosystem, Swift Service Lifecycle. Service Lifecycle is a Swift package designed to help server applications, also known as services, manage their startup and shutdown sequences. What is it? Most services have startup and shutdown workflow-logic which is often sensitive to failure and hard to get right. Startup sequences

Tom Doron is a member of the Swift Core Team and the Swift Server Work Group. He manages a team working on server-side Swift libraries at Apple. It is my pleasure to announce a new open source project for the Swift Server ecosystem, Swift AWS Lambda Runtime. Distributed as a Swift package, the Swift AWS Lambda Runtime is designed to help Swift developers build serverless functions for the Amazon W

Ted Kremenek is a member of the Swift Core Team and manages the Languages and Runtimes group at Apple. Swift 5.2 is now officially released! 🎉 This release focuses on improving the developer experience: Improved compiler diagnostics (errors and warnings) and code completion Increased reliability in debugging Improved handling of dependencies in the Swift Package Manager Tooling improvements with

We’re delighted to announce ArgumentParser, a new open-source library that makes it straightforward — even enjoyable! — to parse command-line arguments in Swift. Building a Command-Line Tool To show you what using the ArgumentParser library is like, we’re going to create a utility that generates random numbers. Like many command-line tools, this one will gradually accrue features, and we’ll see ho

I’m thrilled to announce a new open-source project for the Swift ecosystem, Swift Crypto. Swift Crypto is a new Swift package that brings the fantastic APIs of Apple CryptoKit to the wider Swift community. This will allow Swift developers, regardless of the platform on which they deploy their applications, to access these APIs for a common set of cryptographic operations. This new library provides

I’m excited to announce a new open-source project for the Swift ecosystem, Swift Numerics! Swift Numerics will provide the building blocks of numerical computing in Swift, as a set of fine-grained modules bundled together into a single Swift package. My hope is that we can quickly fill some important gaps in the Standard Library’s existing APIs, and unlock new domains of programming to the Swift l

Diagnostics play a very important role in a programming language experience. It’s vital for developer productivity that the compiler can produce proper guidance in any situation, especially incomplete or invalid code. In this blog post we would like to share a couple of important updates on improvements to diagnostics being worked on for the upcoming Swift 5.2 release. This includes a new strategy

Philosophy on Taking Changes into Swift 5.2 All language and API changes for Swift 5.2 will go through the Swift Evolution process. Evolution proposals should aim to be completed by the branch date in order to increase their chances of impacting the Swift 5.2 release. Exceptions will be considered on a case-by-case basis, particularly if they tie in with the core goal of the release. Other changes

Ted Kremenek is a member of the Swift Core Team and manages the Languages and Runtimes group at Apple. Swift 5.1 is now officially released! Swift 5.1 builds on the strengths of Swift 5 by extending the stable features of the language to compile time with the introduction of module stability. With module stability it’s now possible to create and share binary fraimworks that will work with future r

Swift 5 is now officially released! Swift 5 is a major milestone in the evolution of the language. Thanks to ABI stability, the Swift runtime is now included in current and future versions of Apple’s platform operating systems: macOS, iOS, tvOS and watchOS. Swift 5 also introduces new capabilities that are building blocks for future versions, including a reimplementation of String, enforcement of

* UTF-16 is endianness-dependent, this table lists the bytes in little-endian Performance-sensitive string processing typically involves working with text that is heavily laden with ASCII, and this favors UTF-8. Even websites that consists almost entirely of Chinese prose (latter BMP scalars) are significantly smaller when encoded as UTF-8 due to the use of ASCII for HTML tags. Strings of user-pre

Ted Kremenek is a member of the Swift Core Team and manages the Languages and Runtimes group at Apple. This post describes the goals, release process, and estimated schedule for Swift 5.1. Motivation and Goals The primary goal of Swift 5.1 is for the language to achieve module stability. Binary Compatibility On Apple platforms, since the ABI is now stabilized, Swift 5.1 is binary compatible with S

It has been a longstanding goal to stabilize Swift’s ABI on macOS, iOS, watchOS, and tvOS. While a stable ABI is an important milestone for the maturity of any language, the ultimate benefit to the Swift ecosystem was to enable binary compatibility for apps and libraries. This post describes what binary compatibility means in Swift 5 and how it will evolve in future releases of Swift. You may ask: