At WWDC 2024, Apple introduced Swift 6, The first major Swift update in five years since Swift 5 and 10th anniversary of Swift.
Bringing several new features and improvements to the language that enhance its performance, safety, and developer productivity.
Swift Over the Years
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2014
Swift 1.0 Launch.
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2015
Open sourced & available for Linux.
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2016
Introduce Swift Package Manager along with Swift 3.0
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2017
Swift 4 Along with a new language mode without requiring all of your swift code to move it at once.
The compiler can support multiple languages modes, So we can freely mix modules compiled as swift 3 and as swift 4 in the same program.
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2018
Brought improvements to the generic system, like conditional conformances. And this was the stage for the next swift release.
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2019
Introduce Swift 5.0 with stable ABI to apple platforms.
For engineers this meant a smaller app download size, because you no longer bundled a complete copy of the swift standard library in your app.
Instead the swift standard library was part of the OS itself, Optimized for the OS & shared across all Swift app & frameworks.
This represented a fundamental shift, becaouse now we could use the full expressive power of Swift to build better, safer APIs and frameworks.
Swift UI Launch.
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2020
Swift arrived to more platforms and the community port to Windows become officially available on Swift.org
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2021
A new key feature launch the concurrency model with Async/Await, Actors, And structured concurrency.
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2022
Introduction of distributed Actors, with concurrency model refinements.
The same year the community released the Swift extension for VSCode. Providing a cross-platform editing experience for Swift development
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2023
Introduction of bidirectional interoperability with C++ (C++ Interop Macros). This made it easier to bring Swift’s safety and expressivity to improve large cross-platform C++ code bases.
Same years introduced Macros. Which helped reduce repetitive boilerplates and enabled a new generation of even more expressive APIs like SwiftData.
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2024
Swift 6.0, Improves portability, performance, and overall developer experience.
It also introduces the Swift 6 language mode, providing data-race safety guarantees that help you write correct concurrent programs.
