This post was originally published at Speaking in Swift by The Browser Company under the title “Interoperability: Swift’s Super Power”.

Swift 5.9 introduced a number of new debugging features to the compiler and LLDB debugger.

Swift 5.9 is now available! 🎉

Once a year, the Swift Server workgroup (SSWG) reflects on recent community accomplishments and lays out focus areas for the year ahead.

We’re excited to announce a new open source package called Swift HTTP Types.

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.

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.

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:

I’m pleased to announce that a preview of the future of Foundation is now available on GitHub!

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

I’m thrilled to announce the formation of the Documentation Workgroup!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Since the last update from the SSWG, the Swift on Server ecosystem has continued to grow and expand.

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.

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 is now officially released!

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!

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 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!

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.

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 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.

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.

The Swift community is growing and Swift Forums are growing with it.

We are delighted to announce a significant expansion of our Swift.org continuous integration testing system. Members of the Swift community have been hard at work to support Swift on a number of new platforms, and we have extended the Swift CI system to support community-hosted nodes for testing additional platforms.

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 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.

This post describes the goals, release process, and estimated schedule for Swift 4.2.

In Swift 4.1 the compiler now supports a new optimization mode which enables dedicated optimizations to reduce code size.

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.

The Swift 4.1 compiler brings the next phase of improvements from the roadmap for generics: conditional conformances.

This post describes the goals, release process, and estimated schedule for Swift 4.1.

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:

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 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.

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.

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.

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 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.

This post describes the goals, release process, and estimated schedule for Swift 4.

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.

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.

This post describes the goals, release process, and estimated schedule for Swift 3.1.

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 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, 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.

We are delighted to introduce Xcode Playground Support as part of the Swift open source community!

We are very pleased to announce Developer Preview 1 of Swift 3.0!

We are pleased to announce Swift 2.3!

This post describes the goals, release process, and estimated schedule for Swift 3.0.

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.

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.

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.

Apple’s Swift Team is happy to announce that Swift’s benchmark suite is now open source.

We are excited to announce that we have rolled out continuous integration (aka, CI) for the Swift project!

Cocoa, the Swift standard library, maybe even your own types and methods—it’s all about to change, and you can help determine how.

This post describes the goals, release process, and estimated schedule for Swift 2.2.

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.

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.

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.