The ‘write once, deploy everywhere’ pipe dream is almost a walled-garden reality, and now the Swift team is making sure its roots reach under the wall and out into the open air.
Faster compilation of code with external dependencies.Īpple has done a great job at improving the experience for writing applications for its own platforms.Better correctness for declaration order and nesting.Better identification of unchanged code (which won’t be re-compiled).Version 5.3 has improved compile time, too a blog post notes three core improvements: When typing in Xcode, the team says both quality and speed of code completion is 15 times better, with improved indentation. The latest iteration also reduces heap use for memory optimization.Ĭode completion is improved, as well. The team now claims version 5.3 is “under” 1.5 times the size of the same Objective-C code. The team notes that a Swift 4 binary is roughly 2.4-times the size of the same code written in Objective-C. The mention of “opportunities” is telling. One common pain-point for developers writing Swift apps is the final product is often larger in size when compared to building in Objective-C, the aging programming language that Swift is meant to replace. “Swift 5.3 continues to focus on language refinements, the developer experience, and expanding the Swift ecosystem to enable more opportunities to write Swift,” says the team behind it. The more recent updates have been iterative, as you can imagine. With last year’s Swift 5, the language received some key milestone updates, including ABI stability.
(If you’re new to the language, check out our previous short tutorials on functions, loops, sets, arrays, structs and classes, and strings.) Swift 5.3
If you’re developing apps and services for iOS, macOS, and iPadOS, you’ll want to pay attention to its latest features and tooling-especially given the radical changes on Apple’s software roadmap.Īhead of the first ARM-based Macs-which many pundits believe will happen in November 2020-the Swift team seems to be emptying its cache in preparation for heightened developer activity across the ecosystem.
Six years after its initial launch, Swift is still in a fairly rapid development cycle, with a focus on stability and maturity.