Swift 5.4 is now officially released! This release contains a variety of language and tooling improvements.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I’m excited to announce Swift Algorithms, a new open-source package of sequence and collection algorithms, along with their related types.

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.

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.

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 is now officially released! 🎉

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.

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.

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.

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:

This post describes the goals, release process, and estimated schedule for Swift 5.3.

Swift 5.2 is now officially released! 🎉

We’re delighted to announce ArgumentParser, a new open-source library that makes it straightforward — even enjoyable! — to parse command-line arguments in Swift.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This post describes the goals, release process, and estimated schedule for Swift 5.2.

Swift 5.1 is now officially released!

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 is now officially released!

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.

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.

This post describes the goals, release process, and estimated schedule for Swift 5.1.

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:

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.

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.

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.

The swift run command has a new --repl option which launches the Swift REPL with support for importing library targets of a package.

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!

This post describes the goals, release process, and estimated schedule for Swift 5.0.