Swift 5 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 exclusive access to memory during runtime, new data types, and support for dynamically callable types.

→ swift.org/blog/swift-5-released/

Swift 5.0 marks a major milestone with ABI stability on Apple platforms, integrating the Swift runtime into macOS, iOS, tvOS, and watchOS for smaller apps and better performance.

The standard library shifts to UTF-8 encoding for efficiency, adds types like Result and SIMD vectors, and implements enhancements such as improved string interpolation and dictionary/set performance.

Language updates include dynamic callable types and memory exclusivity enforcement in release builds, while the Package Manager gains features like dependency mirroring and code coverage. Source compatibility with Swift 4 persists, with Xcode 10.2 offering a migrator for updates.