Swift.org (original) (raw)
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Redesigned Swift.org is now live
June 4, 2025
Over the past few months, the website workgroup has been redesigning Swift.org. On behalf of the website workgroup, I’m pleased to announce that we have merged the initial changes.
Swift at Apple: Migrating the Password Monitoring service from Java
June 2, 2025
Swift is heavily used in production for building cloud services at Apple, with incredible results. Last year, the Password Monitoring service was rewritten in Swift, handling multiple billions of requests per day from devices all over the world. In comparison with the previous Java service, the updated backend delivers a 40% increase in performance, along with improved scalability, security, and availability.
ICYMI: Memory Safety, Ecosystem Talks, and Java Interoperability at FOSDEM 2025
May 5, 2025
The Swift community had a strong presence at FOSDEM 2025, the world’s largest independently run open source conference, held every year in Brussels, Belgium. FOSDEM highlighted a range of Swift-related talks related to memory safety, a broad ecosystem around Swift including using it to develop web services and embedded projects, and new areas of the project including Java interoperability.
Swift 6.1 Released
March 31, 2025
Swift 6.1 is now available!
Introducing swiftly 1.0
March 28, 2025
Today we’re delighted to introduce the first stable release of swiftly, a Swift version manager that takes the pain out of installing, managing and updating your Swift toolchain.
How Swift's server support powers Things Cloud
February 21, 2025
You might be familiar with Things, a delightful personal task manager that has won two Apple Design Awards and is available across Apple devices including iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and Apple Vision Pro. At Cultured Code, the team behind Things, we care about a great user experience across every aspect of the product. This extends to our server back end, and after a rewrite our Things Cloud service has transitioned entirely to Swift. Over the past year in production, Swift has consistently proven to be reliable, performant, and remarkably well-suited for our server-side need.
Introducing gRPC Swift 2
February 14, 2025
Say hello to gRPC Swift 2: a major update that brings first-class concurrency support and more expressive APIs for a seamless developer experience.
Updating the Visual Studio Code extension for Swift
February 10, 2025
Today, we are excited to announce a new version of the Swift extension for Visual Studio Code – now published to the extension marketplaceas an official supported release of the Swift team. The aim of this extension is to provide a high-quality, feature-complete extension that makes developing Swift applications on all platforms a seamless experience.
The Next Chapter in Swift Build Technologies
February 1, 2025
Swift continues to grow in popularity as a cross-platform language supporting a wide variety of use cases, with support on a variety of embedded devices, form factors that encompass wearables to server, and a wide variety of operating systems. As Swift expands, there’s value in investing in matching cross-platform build tools that provide a powerful, consistent, and flexible experience across the ecosystem.
Announcing Swift 6
September 17, 2024
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.
Introducing Oblivious HTTP support in Swift
August 21, 2024
We’re excited to introduce an implementation of provisional support for Oblivious HTTP to the Swift ecosystem, with the availability of a new package called SwiftNIO Oblivious HTTP.
Announcing Swift Homomorphic Encryption
July 30, 2024
We’re excited to announce a new open source Swift package for homomorphic encryption in Swift:swift-homomorphic-encryption.
Plotting a Path to a Package Ecosystem without Data Race Errors
July 1, 2024
Swift 6 introduces compile-time data race safety checking for any code that opts in to use the Swift 6 language mode. While individual modules can adopt this mode incrementally and independently of their dependencies, the full benefit of runtime data race safety is only realized when all modules have opted in. Therefore, the quick adoption of Swift 6 language mode across the ecosystem of open-source packages will play a key role in advancing data race safety across the entire Swift ecosystem.
New GitHub Organization for the Swift Project
June 10, 2024
Today, we are announcing an exciting development for the Swift programming language: its migration to a dedicated GitHub organization at GitHub.com/swiftlang.
Get Started with Embedded Swift on ARM and RISC-V Microcontrollers
April 3, 2024
We’re pleased to introduce a repository of example projects that demonstrate how Embedded Swift can be used to develop software on a range of microcontrollers.
SSWG 2024 Annual Update
March 28, 2024
In this annual post, the Swift Server WorkGroup (SSWG) reflects on the community, ecosystem-wide accomplishments and the workgroup’s focus areas for the year ahead.
Writing GNOME Apps with Swift
March 25, 2024
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.
Introducing the Benchmark Package: Complementing Unit Tests with Performance Checks
March 20, 2024
In the world of software development, the old adage “make it work, make it right, make it fast” serves as a guiding principle for creating robust, efficient applications. This journey starts with ensuring that our code functions as intended, a task where unit and integration testing have proven indispensable. However, ensuring functionality is only part of the equation. The true measure of an application’s excellence extends into its performance - how fast and efficiently it operates under various conditions. Herein lies the critical but often overlooked third step: making it fast.
Byte-sized Swift: Building Tiny Games for the Playdate
March 12, 2024
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.
Iterate Over Parameter Packs in Swift 6.0
March 7, 2024
Parameter packs, introduced in Swift 5.9, make it possible to write generics that abstract over the number of arguments. This eliminates the need to have overloaded copies of the same generic function for one argument, two arguments, three arguments, and so on. With Swift 6.0, pack iteration makes it easier than ever to work with parameter packs. This post will show you how to make the best use of pack iteration.
Swift 5.10 Released
March 5, 2024
Swift was designed to be safe by default, preventing entire categories of programming mistakes at compile time. Sources of undefined behavior in C-based languages, such as using variables before they’re initialized or a use-after-free, are defined away in Swift.
Swift joins Google Summer of Code 2024
February 23, 2024
We’re happy to announce that Swift will once again be joining Google Summer of Code 2024!
On-device ML research with MLX and Swift
February 20, 2024
The Swift programming language has a lot of potential to be used for machine learning research because it combines the ease of use and high-level syntax of a language like Python with the speed of a compiled language like C++.
Swift Summer of Code 2023 Summary
February 13, 2024
The Swift project regularly participates in Google Summer of Code in order to help people new to the open source ecosystem dip their toes in contributing to Swift and its growing ecosystem.
Swift OpenAPI Generator 1.0 Released
January 31, 2024
We’re happy to announce the stable 1.0 release of Swift OpenAPI Generator!
OpenAPI is an open standard for describing the behavior of HTTP services with a rich ecosystem of tooling. One thing OpenAPI is particularly known for is tooling to generate interactive documentation. But the core motivation of OpenAPI is code-generation, which allows adopters to use an API-first approach to server development and, because many existing services document their API in this format, allows client developers to generate type-safe, idiomatic code to call these APIs.
On-Crash Backtraces in Swift
November 8, 2023
The new Swift 5.9 release contains a number of helpful, new features for debugging code, including an out-of-process, interactive crash handler to inspect crashes in real time, the ability to trigger the debugger for just-in-time debugging, along with concurrency-aware backtracing to make it easier to understand control flow in a program that uses structured concurrency.
Introducing Packages on Swift.org
November 1, 2023
Today, Swift.org gains a useful, new top-level Packages page.
Swift Everywhere: Using Interoperability to Build on Windows
October 13, 2023
This post was originally published at Speaking in Swift by The Browser Company under the title “Interoperability: Swift’s Super Power”.
Debugging Improvements in Swift 5.9
September 28, 2023
Swift 5.9 introduced a number of new debugging features to the compiler and LLDB debugger.
Swift 5.9 Released
September 18, 2023
Swift 5.9 is now available! 🎉
SSWG 2023 Annual Update
August 17, 2023
Once a year, the Swift Server workgroup (SSWG) reflects on recent community accomplishments and lays out focus areas for the year ahead.
Introducing Swift HTTP Types
July 10, 2023
We’re excited to announce a new open source package called Swift HTTP Types.
Introducing Swift OpenAPI Generator
June 12, 2023
We’re excited to announce a set of open source libraries designed to help both client and server developers streamline their workflow around HTTP communication using the industry‑standard OpenAPI specification.
Using Upcoming Feature Flags
May 30, 2023
Beginning in Swift 5.8 you can flexibly adopt upcoming Swift features using a new compiler flag and compilation condition. This post describes the problem upcoming feature flags solve, their benefits, and how to get started using them in your projects.
Evolving the Swift Workgroups
May 18, 2023
Today, the Swift Core Team is announcing forward-looking changes to the structure of Swift, the work, and the people around it. These changes include new groups, names, organization, as well as inclusion as a first-class concept for each group:
Foundation Package Preview Now Available
April 26, 2023
I’m pleased to announce that a preview of the future of Foundation is now available on GitHub!
Swift 5.8 Released!
March 30, 2023
Swift 5.8 is now officially released! 🎉 This release includes major additions to the language and standard library, including hasFeature to support piecemeal adoption of upcoming features, an improved developer experience, improvements to tools in the Swift ecosystem including Swift-DocC, Swift Package Manager, and SwiftSyntax, refined Windows support, and more.
Swift Package Index gains Apple sponsorship
March 24, 2023
Building a thriving open source ecosystem is important to Swift’s success, and open source packages are the building blocks that help power countless Swift projects. As the number of packages increases, discovery becomes critical for developers needing to find the tools and libraries that help them build their apps and services.
Introducing Swift Certificates and Swift ASN.1
March 7, 2023
I’m excited to announce two new open source Swift packages: swift-certificates and swift-asn1. Together, these libraries provide developers a faster and safer implementation of X.509 certificates, a critical technology that powers the security of TLS.
“The Swift Programming Language” book now published with DocC
February 16, 2023
We’re happy to announce that The Swift Programming Language book (TSPL) is now published using Swift-DocC, starting with Swift 5.8. TSPL is now ready to start accepting content contributions, under the direction of the Swift Documentation Workgroup.
The Future of Foundation
December 9, 2022
The Foundation framework 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.
Swift Summer of Code 2022 Summary
December 5, 2022
Google Summer of Code (also known as GSoC) is a long-running mentorship program focused on introducing contributors to the world of open source development. This year marks the fifth time the Swift project has participated in GSoC.
Swift project in 2023
November 18, 2022
There’s a lot of exciting work going on in the Swift project, and it’s hard to keep track of it all because it’s happening in many different repositories, pull requests, and forum threads. To give the community a better view of the big picture, the Core Team surveyed workgroups and developers across the project and collected information about what they’re focused on over the next year.
Swift 5.7 Released!
September 12, 2022
Swift 5.7 is now officially released! Swift 5.7 includes major additions to the language and standard library, enhancements to the compiler for a better developer experience, improvements to tools in the Swift ecosystem including SourceKit-LSP and the Swift Package Manager, refined Windows support, and more.
Announcing SwiftNIO IMAP
August 30, 2022
As part of expanding the Swift on Server ecosystem, we’re thrilled to announce the release of a new IMAPv4 parser and encoder, SwiftNIO IMAP.
Server Guides Now on Swift.org
August 18, 2022
The Swift Server Workgroup has maintained a set of open source guides for Swift on Server development for a number of years. Now that swift.org is open source, we’ve moved the guides to this site.
Announcing the Documentation Workgroup
July 22, 2022
I’m thrilled to announce the formation of the Documentation Workgroup!
Swift Extension for Visual Studio Code
July 14, 2022
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.
Swift language announcements from WWDC22
July 6, 2022
Developer Spotlight: Porting Graphing Calculator from C++ to Swift
June 30, 2022
Developer Spotlight is a series highlighting interesting Swift developers from around the world. This post is authored by Ron Avitzur, author of the Pacific Tech Graphing Calculator.
Exploring Swift: Property wrappers in the wild
June 21, 2022
Property wrappers were introduced in Swift 5.1 as a way to make it easier to reuse common programming patterns, but since then they have grown to work with local context, function and closure parameters, and more. We’re lucky enough to have lots of creators in our community creating apps with property wrappers then writing about their experiences, and we’d like to share a few of our favorites with you here.
Announcing the Language Workgroup
June 15, 2022
The Swift community has accomplished a great deal together, with hundreds of changes to Swift through the Swift Evolution process and significant advances to the language and tooling since Swift became an open-source project. In recent years, there has been increased momentum in the community through various workgroups, including Diversity in Swift and the Server Workgroup. The Core Team recognizes the opportunity to tap into the potential of these workgroups to amplify the impact of the community and support more members of the community driving impactful investments.
Celebrating learning experiences from the 2021 Swift Mentorship Program
May 19, 2022
As we prepare for the 2022 Swift Mentorship Program, we’re excited to share insights from a few of last year’s mentees on their learning journey.
SSWG 2021 Annual Update
April 25, 2022
Since the last update from the SSWG, the Swift on Server ecosystem has continued to grow and expand.
Introducing Swift Async Algorithms
March 24, 2022
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.
Swift.org Website is Now Open Source
March 15, 2022
The Swift.org site has long served as the hub where developers come together to work on the open source Swift compiler, libraries, and tools. Today, we are happy to announce that the Swift.org website itself is also an open source project, ready for community contributions. With this move, the website is also expanding its mandate to better support the entire community of Swift users, not just contributors.
Swift 5.6 Released!
March 14, 2022
Swift 5.6 is now officially released!
Introducing Swift Distributed Actors
October 28, 2021
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!
Swift-DocC is Now Open Source
October 13, 2021
At WWDC21, Apple announced Swift-DocC, a new documentation compiler for Swift frameworks 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 integrated images.
Swift 5.5 Released!
September 20, 2021
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 iteration on the concurrency (and other additions) that make up the release. Thank you!
Package Collections
June 7, 2021
In Swift 5.5, the Swift Package Manager adds support for package collections — bite size curated lists of packages that make it easy to discover, share and adopt packages.
Announcing the Swift Mentorship Program
May 10, 2021
We’re thrilled to announce the Swift Mentorship Program — a new contributor program for the Swift community and part of the Diversity in Swift initiative. The Swift Mentorship Program is designed to support developers as they become active open source contributors to the Swift project, providing direct mentorship with experienced members of the community.
Swift 5.4 Released!
April 26, 2021
Swift 5.4 is now officially released! This release contains a variety of language and tooling improvements.
Introducing Swift Collections
April 5, 2021
I’m thrilled to announce Swift Collections, a new open-source package focused on extending the set of available Swift data structures. Like the Swift Algorithms and Swift Numerics packages before it, we’re releasing Swift Collections to help incubate new functionality for the Swift Standard Library.
Celebrating Women’s History Month
March 24, 2021
This Women’s History Month, we’re so happy to celebrate the amazing women developers in our community. Women have made an immense impact on the Swift ecosystem by building important tools we use every day, creating resources to pass on what they have learned, and more. This post highlights a few outstanding contributions from individuals in the Women in Swift community.
Celebrating Black History Month
February 22, 2021
Black History Month is a time to learn about, reflect on, and celebrate the impact and accomplishments of the Black community. In honor of Black History Month, we have curated a handful of outstanding contributions from the Black Swift community to acknowledge and celebrate their impact on the Swift ecosystem.
Diversity in Swift
December 16, 2020
6 years ago, Swift was announced. In the years since, a thriving community has emerged around a shared passion for building and using the Swift programming language. This community has spread far beyond Apple through conferences, open source repositories, community-authored books, and more — people are always finding new ways to connect with and support other Swift developers around the world. However, we feel we can always do more to encourage a wider range of developers to actively engage in our community. That’s why we’re excited to announce Diversity in Swift. This initiative is focused on further elevating a wide variety of voices, and making it easier for developers to start learning or contributing to Swift, regardless of their background.
Accessibility and Inclusion in the Swift Community
December 16, 2020
Diversity and inclusion are both critically important values when writing software designed to be used and enjoyed by everyone. The Swift community embraces these values, and we are excited to highlight ways to make sure everyone feels welcome, and bring even more people into the fold of Swift development.
Introducing SwiftNIO SSH
November 19, 2020
I am delighted to introduce a new open source project for the Swift Server ecosystem, SwiftNIO SSH. Distributed as a Swift package, SwiftNIO SSH is designed to enable Swift developers to interact with the SSH network protocol.
Introducing Swift Service Discovery
October 21, 2020
It is my pleasure to announce a new open source project for the Swift Server ecosystem, Swift Service Discovery. Service Discovery is a Swift package designed to establish a standard API that can be implemented by various service discovery backends such as DNS-based, key-value store, etc.
Announcing Swift Algorithms
October 7, 2020
I’m excited to announce Swift Algorithms, a new open-source package of sequence and collection algorithms, along with their related types.
Introducing Swift Atomics
October 1, 2020
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.
Swift System is Now Open Source
September 25, 2020
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.
Introducing Swift on Windows
September 22, 2020
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.
Swift 5.3 released!
September 16, 2020
Swift 5.3 is now officially released! 🎉
Introducing Swift Cluster Membership
August 27, 2020
It is my pleasure to announce a new open source project for the Swift Server ecosystem, Swift Cluster Membership. This library aims to help Swift grow in a new space of server applications: clustered multi-node distributed systems. With this library we provide reusable runtime-agnostic membership protocol implementations which can be adopted in various clustering use-cases.
Introducing Swift Service Lifecycle
July 15, 2020
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.
Introducing Swift AWS Lambda Runtime
May 29, 2020
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 Web Services Lambda platform.
Additional Linux Distributions
May 5, 2020
It is my pleasure to announce a new set of Linux distributions officially supported by the Swift project. Swift.org now offers downloadable toolchain and Docker images for the following new Linux distributions:
Swift 5.3 Release Process
March 25, 2020
This post describes the goals, release process, and estimated schedule for Swift 5.3.
Swift 5.2 Released!
March 24, 2020
Swift 5.2 is now officially released! 🎉
Announcing ArgumentParser
February 27, 2020
We’re delighted to announce ArgumentParser, a new open-source library that makes it straightforward — even enjoyable! — to parse command-line arguments in Swift.
Standard Library Preview Package
February 18, 2020
I’m excited to announce a new open-source package and an enhancement to the Swift Evolution process: the Standard Library Preview package! The preview package provides access to functionality that has been accepted into the Swift standard library through the Swift Evolution process, but has not yet shipped as part of an official Swift release. This will allow us to incorporate feedback informed by real-world usage and remove many of the technical obstacles to contributing to the standard library.
Library Evolution in Swift
February 13, 2020
Swift 5.0 introduced a stable binary interface on Apple platforms. This meant that apps built with the Swift 5.0 compiler can use the Swift runtime and standard library built into the operating system, and that existing apps will remain compatible with new versions of the Swift runtime in future operating system releases.
Introducing Swift Crypto
February 3, 2020
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.
Swift Numerics
November 7, 2019
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 language.
SSWG Annual Update
October 31, 2019
The Swift Server Work Group (SSWG) set out 12 months ago to begin defining and prioritizing new efforts to address the needs of the Swift server community. Since then, we’ve been busy meeting regularly, working with the community, defining guidelines, writing Swift packages, voting on proposals, posting in the forums, and much more. We feel that we’ve made significant progress toward those goals we set out last year and we’d like to share a high-level update with you today.
New Diagnostic Architecture Overview
October 17, 2019
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.
Swift 5.2 Release Process
September 24, 2019
This post describes the goals, release process, and estimated schedule for Swift 5.2.
Swift 5.1 Released!
September 20, 2019
Swift 5.1 is now officially released!
Thread Sanitizer for Swift on Linux
August 13, 2019
Thread Sanitizer is now available on Linux as part of Swift 5.1! Head over to Swift.org and grab a Swift 5.1 Development snapshot to try it out.
Swift 5 Released!
March 25, 2019
Swift 5 is now officially released!
UTF-8 String
March 20, 2019
Swift 5 switches the preferred encoding of strings from UTF-16 to UTF-8 while preserving efficient Objective-C-interoperability. Because the String type abstracts away these low-level concerns, no source-code changes from developers should be necessary*, but it’s worth highlighting some of the benefits this move gives us now and in the future.
Behind the Proposal — SE-0200 Enhancing String Literals Delimiters to Support Raw Text
February 20, 2019
The development, refinement, and deployment of SE-0200 Enhancing String Literals Delimiters to Support Raw Text was a long and surprising journey. It ended with a uniquely Swift take on “raw strings” that focused on adding custom delimiters to string literals and escape sequences.
Swift 5.1 Release Process
February 18, 2019
This post describes the goals, release process, and estimated schedule for Swift 5.1.
Evolving Swift On Apple Platforms After ABI Stability
February 11, 2019
With the release of Swift 5.0, Swift is now ABI stable and is delivered as a core component of macOS, iOS, tvOS, and watchOS. ABI stability has been a goal for Swift since its inception, and brings with it many benefits for developers and users of these platforms:
ABI Stability and More
February 7, 2019
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.
Introducing the sourcekitd Stress Tester
February 6, 2019
Sourcekitd provides the data backing key editor features like code completion, semantic highlighting, and refactoring for Swift files in both Xcode and the recently announced SourceKit-LSP. To help improve its robustness, we’re introducing a new tool, the sourcekitd stress tester, that over the past few months has helped find 91 reproducible sourcekitd crashes, assertion failures, and hangs. This post covers the stress tester’s implementation, its deployment in Swift’s CI and PR testing, and how Swift developers can run it over their own projects to help improve the Swift editing experience for everyone.
Swift 5 Exclusivity Enforcement
February 5, 2019
The Swift 5 release enables runtime checking of “Exclusive Access to Memory” by default in Release builds, further enhancing Swift’s capabilities as a safe language. In Swift 4, these runtime checks were only enabled in Debug builds. In this post, I’ll first explain what this change means for Swift developers before delving into why it is essential to Swift’s strategy for safety and performance.
REPL Support for Swift Packages
October 8, 2018
The swift run command has a new --repl option which launches the Swift REPL with support for importing library targets of a package.
How Mirror Works
September 26, 2018
Swift places a lot of emphasis on static typing, but it also supports rich metadata about types, which allows code to inspect and manipulate arbitrary values at runtime. This is exposed to Swift programmers through the Mirror API. One might wonder, how does something like Mirror work in a language with so much emphasis on static types? Let’s take a look!
Swift 5.0 Release Process
September 25, 2018
This post describes the goals, release process, and estimated schedule forSwift 5.0.
Swift 4.2 Released!
September 17, 2018
Swift 4.2 is now officially released! Swift 4.2 builds on the strengths of Swift 4, delivering faster compile times, improving the debugging experience, updating the standard library, and converging on binary compatibility.
Reimplementation of Implicitly Unwrapped Optionals
April 26, 2018
A new implementation of implicitly unwrapped optionals (IUOs) landed in the Swift compiler earlier this year and is available to try in recent Swift snapshots. This completes the implementation of SE-0054 - Abolish ImplicitlyUnwrappedOptional Type. This is an important change to the language that eliminated some inconsistencies in type checking and clarified the rule of how these values are to be treated so that it is consistent and easy to reason about. For more information, see the motivation section of that proposal.
Swift 4.1 Released!
March 29, 2018
Swift 4.1 is now officially released! It contains updates to the core language, including more support for generics, new build options, as well as minor enhancements to Swift Package Manager and Foundation. There was also significant progress made in stabilizing the ABI.
Swift 4.2 Release Process
February 28, 2018
This post describes the goals, release process, and estimated schedule forSwift 4.2.
Code Size Optimization Mode in Swift 4.1
February 8, 2018
In Swift 4.1 the compiler now supports a new optimization mode which enables dedicated optimizations to reduce code size.
Swift Forums Now Open!
January 19, 2018
We are delighted to announce that the Swift project has completed the process of migrating to the Swift Forums as the primary method for discussion and communication! The former mailing lists have been shut down and archived, and all mailing list content has been imported into the new forum system.
Conditional Conformance in the Standard Library
January 8, 2018
The Swift 4.1 compiler brings the next phase of improvements from theroadmap for generics: conditional conformances.
Swift 4.1 Release Process
October 17, 2017
This post describes the goals, release process, and estimated schedule for Swift 4.1.
Xcode 9.1 Improves Display of Fatal Errors
October 5, 2017
Swift has language constructs that allow you to specify your program’s expectations. If these expectations are not met at runtime, the program will be terminated. For example, indexing into an array implicitly expresses an expectation that the index is in bounds:
Dictionary and Set Improvements in Swift 4.0
October 4, 2017
In the latest release of Swift, dictionaries and sets gain a number of new methods and initializers that make common tasks easier than ever. Operations like grouping, filtering, and transforming values can now be performed in a single step, letting you write more expressive and efficient code.
Swift 4.0 Released!
September 19, 2017
Swift 4 is now officially released! Swift 4 builds on the strengths of Swift 3, delivering greater robustness and stability, providing source code compatibility with Swift 3, making improvements to the standard library, and adding features like archival and serialization.
Swift Local Refactoring
August 22, 2017
Xcode 9 includes a brand new refactoring engine. It can transform code locally within a single Swift source file, or globally, such as renaming a method or property that occurs in multiple files and even different languages. The logic behind local refactorings is implemented entirely in the compiler and SourceKit, and is now open source in the swift repository. Therefore, any Swift enthusiast can contribute refactoring actions to the language. This post discusses how a simple refactoring can be implemented and surfaced in Xcode.
Swift Package Manager Manifest API Redesign
June 21, 2017
The Package Manager in Swift 4 includes the redesigned Package.swift manifest API. The new API is easier to use and follows the design guidelines. The target inference rules in Swift 3 Package Manager were a common source of confusion. We revised these rules and removed most of the inference, favoring the practice of explicitly specifying package structure in the manifest.
Swift Source Compatibility Test Suite Now Available
April 24, 2017
We are pleased to announce the release of a new Swift source compatibility test suite as part of the effort to maintain source compatibility in future Swift releases.
Swift 3.1 Released!
March 27, 2017
Swift 3.1 is now officially released! Swift 3.1 is a minor release that contains improvements and refinements to the Standard Library. Thanks to efforts by IBM and other members of the community, it also includes many updates to the Linux implementation of Swift. There are also a number of updates to Swift Package Manager.
Swift 4 Release Process
February 16, 2017
This post describes the goals, release process, and estimated schedule for Swift 4.
Faster Mix-and-Match Builds with Precompiled Bridging Headers
January 26, 2017
An examination of build times of Xcode projects that mix Objective-C and Swift, which can contain large bridging headers, shows that the Swift compiler spends a lot of time re-processing the same bridging headers for all the Swift files in a project. In certain projects, each additional Swift file increases the overall build time noticeably, even when the Swift file is quite modest.
Swift Evolution Status Page Now Available
January 18, 2017
We’re pleased to announce the release of the new Swift Evolution status page as a one-stop destination for information about proposed changes to Swift.
Swift 3.1 Release Process
December 9, 2016
This post describes the goals, release process, and estimated schedule for Swift 3.1.
Server APIs Work Group
October 25, 2016
Since Swift became available on Linux there has been a huge amount of interest in using Swift on the server, resulting in the emergence of a number of Web Frameworks, including Kitura, Vapor, Perfect, and Zewo, along with many others. As an important part of the Swift ecosystem, and one that we are keen to foster, we are today announcing the formation of the Server APIs work group.
Whole-Module Optimization in Swift 3
October 21, 2016
Whole-module optimization is an optimization mode of the Swift compiler. The performance win of whole-module optimization heavily depends on the project, but it can be up to two or even five times.
Swift 3.0 Released!
September 13, 2016
Swift 3.0, the first major release of Swift since it was open-sourced, is now officially released! Swift 3 is a huge release containing major improvements and refinements to the core language and Standard Library, major additions to the Linux port of Swift, and the first official release of the Swift Package Manager.
Xcode Playground Support
July 7, 2016
We are delighted to introduce Xcode Playground Supportas part of the Swift open source community!
Swift 3.0 Preview 1 Released!
June 13, 2016
We are very pleased to announce Developer Preview 1 of Swift 3.0!
Swift 2.3
June 12, 2016
We are pleased to announce Swift 2.3!
Swift 3.0 Release Process
May 6, 2016
This post describes the goals, release process, and estimated schedule for Swift 3.0.
New Features in Swift 2.2
March 30, 2016
Swift 2.2 brings new syntax, new features, and some deprecations too. It is an interim release before Swift 3 comes later this year with even bigger changes, and the changes in Swift 2.2 align with the broader goals of Swift 3 to focus on gradually stabilizing the core language and Standard Library by adding missing features, refining what is already there, and removing what is no longer needed in the language. All changes in Swift 2.2 went through the community-driven Swift evolution process — where over 30 proposals have been submitted, reviewed, and accepted since Swift was open-sourced a few months ago.
Swift 2.2 Released!
March 21, 2016
We are very pleased to announce the release of Swift 2.2! This is the first official release of Swift since it was open-sourced on December 3, 2015. Notably, the release includes contributions from 212 non-Apple contributors — changes that span from simple bug fixes to enhancements and alterations to the core language and Swift Standard Library.
Expanding Commit Access
February 29, 2016
Now that the Swift Continuous Integration system is established and proven, we’d like to grant commit access on a more frequent basis to project contributors who have established a track record of good contributions. If you would like commit access, please send an email to the code owners list with a list of 5 non-trivial pull requests that we accepted without modifications.
Swift Benchmark Suite now Available
February 8, 2016
Apple’s Swift Team is happy to announce that Swift’s benchmark suite is now open source.
Continuous Integration now Available
February 1, 2016
We are excited to announce that we have rolled out continuous integration (aka, CI) for the Swift project!
It's Coming: the Great Swift API Transformation
January 29, 2016
Cocoa, the Swift standard library, maybe even your own types and methods—it’s all about to change, and you can help determine how.
Swift 2.2 Release Process
January 5, 2016
This post describes the goals, release process, and estimated schedule for Swift 2.2.
Swift 3 API Design Guidelines
December 3, 2015
The design of commonly-used libraries has a large impact on the overall feel of a programming language. Great libraries feel like an extension of the language itself, and consistency across libraries elevates the overall development experience. To aid in the construction of great Swift libraries, one of the major goals for Swift 3 is to define a set of API design guidelines and to apply those design guidelines consistently.
The Swift Linux Port
December 3, 2015
With the launch of the open source Swift project, we are also releasing a port that works with the Linux operating system! You can build it from the Swift sources or download pre-built binaries for Ubuntu. The port is still a work in progress but we’re happy to say that it is usable today for experimentation. Currently x86_64 is the only supported architecture on Linux.
The Swift.org Blog
December 3, 2015
Welcome to the blog on Swift.org! Today we launched the open source Swift project along with the Swift.org website. We couldn’t be more excited to work together in an open community to find and fix issues, add enhancements, and bring Swift to new platforms.