Vapor, a popular Swift web framework, is planning its next major release, Vapor 5, which will fully embrace Swift Concurrency by eliminating EventLoopFutures and leveraging AsyncSequences, actors, and Sendable conformances for improved performance and safety.
Apple announced Swift Distributed Actors, a new open-source package for server-side Swift that provides a complete cluster library for the experimental distributed actor language feature, released early to gather community feedback.
Apple introduced Swift-DocC at WWDC21 as a new documentation compiler for Swift frameworks and packages, now released as open source with support for macOS and Linux.
Swift 5.5 is a major release introducing powerful concurrency features like async/await, structured concurrency, and Actors, alongside other enhancements.
Swift 5.5 introduces package collections to the Swift Package Manager, enabling curated lists of packages to simplify discovery and adoption for specific tasks.
Swift 5.4 introduces new language features like multiple variadic parameters, extended implicit member syntax, result builders, and support for overloading local functions and property wrappers for local variables.
Swift Collections is a new open-source package that adds advanced data structures like Deque, OrderedSet, and OrderedDictionary to extend the Swift Standard Library’s offerings beyond Array, Set, and Dictionary.
SwiftNIO SSH is a new open-source Swift package for the Swift Server ecosystem, providing a programmatic implementation of the SSHv2 protocol for building custom SSH clients and servers.
Swift Service Discovery is a new open-source package for the Swift Server ecosystem, providing a standard API for service discovery backends like DNS or key-value stores, without implementing the functionality itself.
Swift Algorithms is a new open-source package offering a suite of generic sequence and collection algorithms, such as chunking, combinations, permutations, and random sampling, designed to replace error-prone loops with clear, performant code.
Swift Atomics is a new open-source package enabling low-level atomic operations in Swift, allowing systems programmers to build concurrent data structures safely.
Swift System is a new open-source library for Apple platforms and Linux, providing idiomatic, type-safe interfaces to system calls and low-level types, replacing error-prone C interfaces like the open function.
The Swift project now offers downloadable toolchain images for Windows, enabling developers to build and run Swift code on this platform.
Swift 5.3 enhances developer productivity with language refinements, better diagnostics, faster code completion, and improved build times.
Swift Cluster Membership is a new open-source Swift package for server applications, providing reusable, runtime agnostic implementations of cluster membership protocols for distributed systems like databases and key-value stores.
Swift Service Lifecycle is a new open-source Swift package designed to simplify and standardise the management of startup and shutdown sequences for server applications.
The Swift AWS Lambda Runtime is a new open-source Swift package that simplifies building server-less functions for AWS Lambda, enabling Swift developers to create scalable, cost-effective cloud solutions with low memory use and fast startup.
The Swift project now officially supports Ubuntu 20.04, CentOS 8, and Amazon Linux 2, alongside Ubuntu 16.04 and 18.04, with downloadable toolchains and Docker images available on Swift.org.
It is not uncommon that I raise an accessibility or usability issue with a client’s design or implementation and am met with either “But Google does this,” or “But Apple does this.”
Swift 5.3 focuses on significant quality and performance improvements while expanding platform support to include Windows and additional Linux distributions.
Swift 5.2 enhances the developer experience with improved compiler diagnostics, faster code completion, better debugging, and refined Swift Package Manager dependency handling.
The Swift ArgumentParser library simplifies parsing command-line arguments with a type-safe, declarative approach using Swift features like property wrappers and reflection.
Swift 5 introduces the Standard Library Preview package, an open-source tool bundling accepted Swift Evolution features not yet in official releases, starting with SE-0270 for subrange operations like subranges(where:) and moveSubranges(_:to:) on collections, plus the RangeSet type.
Swift's library evolution support, enabled via BUILD_LIBRARY_FOR_DISTRIBUTION in Xcode or -enable-library-evolution in swiftc, allows framework authors to make additive API changes while maintaining binary compatibility, ensuring clients don't need recompilation.
Swift Crypto is a new open-source Swift package that extends Apple CryptoKit's APIs to non-Apple platforms by using BoringSSL for cryptographic primitives, while deferring to CryptoKit on Apple systems for seamless cross-platform development.