The Swift programming team wants to pursue new frontiers as it looks to version 6 of the programming language. According to the team, it has reached critical milestones of majority over the last couple of versions, making it possible for users to invest in using Swift.
For instance, the arrival of ABI and module stability has enabled the creation of stable binary frameworks and the Swift Package Manager, which has integrated support both in Xcode and other IDEs, provides a cross-platform solution for building and distributing Swift libraries.
“The goal of Swift is to provide a fantastic developer experience,” the developers behind Swift wrote in a post. “Simply put, developers should be both highly productive and experience joy when programming in Swift.”
The major areas that the development team is looking into include creating faster builds more informative and accurate diagnostics, responsive code completion, and reliable and fluid debugging experience.
They also emphasized the importance of rounding out capabilities in the language to support building expressive and elegant APIs such as variadic generics and DSL capabilities like function builders, as well refining Swift’s implementation to be used for low-level symptoms. Also important is providing solutions for major language features such as memory ownership and concurrency.
In addition, the team will work on accelerating the growth of its ecosystem by expanding the number of platforms where Swift is available and supported, improving how the software is installed and deployed, and supporting cross-platform tooling.
“What will differentiate Swift 6 from the Swift 5.x releases will be a significant change in the capabilities of the language. At this point, that change is improved concurrency support, and further progress towards the memory ownership model as outlined in John McCall’s ownership manifesto 1.5k,” the team wrote. “These are major changes to the language that will take discussion, investigation, and time to implement.”
