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The evolution of Swift – the next level

It has been a good year (December 2015) since Swift saw the light of day (public) as an open-source programming language. So I think it’s time to see what evolution and outcomes this relatively young programming language had now found in the open-source developer community after my first evaluation and prognosis in April 2016. To get one thing straight.

Swift is already being used to implement productive (web) portal projects (such as the website of the Danish triathlon event Ironman; Github source). Swift has developed from a pure Apple platform language (iOS, macOS, tvOS, watchOS) to a Linux-friendly backend/web framework-compatible overall system in such a short time. The current version Swift3 also enjoys unlimited compatibility in the segment of “small ARM architecture computers” such as the Raspberry Pi3 and the available Ubuntu 16.04 operating system; ergo the software of the Internet-Of-Things (IoT) can now actually also be developed with this ultra-modern and high-performance programming language.

Milestones in the Swift evolution

Starting with Swift3, the intensive stabilization of the language syntax has now borne fruit so that Chris Lattner(Main developer and “father” of Swift) has now heralded a new era of “Source Compatibility.” Means in German: From the next version of Swift (3.1 etc.), there will no longer be any source code incompatibilities with previously written Swift3 code.

So there will be no need for sometimes more significant code movements in projects (can be found in Xcode as Migration Assistant) like in the early days from Swift1 to Swift2 to Swift3 – much to the delight of the developers who they have plagued up to now. This announcement also paves the way for other tools related to Swift at Apple and beyond to further optimize and stabilize them in a targeted manner. (e.g., static analyzer, code completion, and refactoring facilities in Xcode)

Not only the language syntax itself has now decisively stabilized (Swift books can directly remain printed without the fear of being far outdated in terms of content before arriving at the bookstore – edition XYZ). The so-called “ABI Stability” of the Swift standard library is now also working on in a targeted manner until the next major Swift4 release this year; the result would then be binary compatibility of source code collected with an “older” and a “newer” version of Swift – another decisive milestone that no longer requires the compulsory recompilation of previously written code

The big hour of the development of third-party libraries that can remain delivered in binary – without having to wait for every Swift iteration actively. The ABI stability would also have the advantage that not every application has to carry its own compiled version of the Swift standard library. It is a central component of future operating systems (system framework/modules for iOS, macOS, etc.