Swift 5.1 introduces Thread Sanitizer on Linux, enabling runtime detection of data races in multithreaded code, which can cause unexpected behaviour or memory corruption despite Swift's single-threaded safety guarantees.
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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.
Swift 5 changes String's preferred encoding from UTF-16 to UTF-8 for better performance in modern computing, like server-side work and C interop, while keeping efficient Objective-C bridging.
SE-0200 introduces custom delimiters for Swift string literals in Swift 5, allowing raw text that ignores escape sequences unless adjusted with matching pound signs, blending features from languages like Rust while retaining Swift's interpolation.
Swift 5.1 aims to achieve module stability for the language. On Apple platforms, it keeps binary compatibility with Swift 5.0 and future releases because the ABI is now stable.
Swift 5.0 achieves ABI stability on Apple platforms, allowing apps to use the OS-provided Swift runtime instead of bundling it, which reduces download sizes and enables better performance through deeper integration.
Swift 5 achieves ABI stability on Apple platforms, ensuring binary compatibility for apps and libraries across future Swift versions without needing to embed the Swift runtime in app bundles.
Sourcekitd powers essential editor features like code completion and refactoring in Xcode and SourceKit-LSP, handling both syntactic and semantic requests for Swift files.
Swift 5 turns on runtime checks for exclusive access to memory by default in release builds.
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The swift run command now includes a --repl option. This lets you start the Swift REPL and import library targets from a package.
Swift provides runtime type inspection through the Mirror API. This allows developers to examine arbitrary values and traverse object graphs without prior knowledge of types at compile time.
Swift 5.0 aims to achieve ABI stability to enable a stable runtime for operating systems, with module stability as a key focus that may land in this release or a later 5.x update.
Swift 4.2 is a major update that enhances compile times, debugging, the standard library, and moves closer to binary compatibility, while maintaining source compatibility with Swift 4 and 4.1 but marking the last release to support Swift 3 compatibility.
Steve Jobs once said, “You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying ‘no’ to 1,000 things.”
The Swift community continues to expand, with developers increasingly relying on ecosystem projects to streamline app development for specific tasks. To foster better interaction, Swift Forums has introduced a new top-level category called Related Projects.
Swift.org has expanded its continuous integration testing system to include community-hosted nodes for additional platforms.
Swift 4.1 reimplements implicitly unwrapped optionals (IUOs) so they act as regular optionals with a flag that allows automatic unwrapping when needed, rather than as a distinct type.
Apple released Swift 4.1 as a minor update that maintains source compatibility with Swift 4.0. It adds generics features such as conditional conformance and synthesised Equatable and Hashable support.
Swift 4.2 serves as a step towards ABI stability in Swift 5, incorporating ABI changes for performance, bug fixes, and targeted improvements to compile-time speed.
Swift 4.1 adds a new optimisation mode called -Osize. This mode helps reduce code size by 5 to 30 percent in some projects.
The Swift project has moved its main discussions from mailing lists to Swift Forums. The old mailing lists are shut down and archived, with their content imported into the new system.
Swift 4.1 adds conditional conformances, which let generic types like Array and Optional conform to protocols such as Equatable or Hashable only when their elements do.
Swift 4.1 is a source-compatible update to Swift 4.0 that adds minor language enhancements, improves the Swift Package Manager and Linux support, and includes quality fixes to the compiler and standard library, but it lacks binary compatibility due to ABI stabilisation work for Swift 5.