After turning open source, Apple's new programming language is ready to take another big leap. In a detailed post on Swift's official blog, Apple's senior source code manager Ted Kremenek announced that Swift 3.0 It will be launched by the end of 2016, with a series of improvements and a long awaited novelty: the availability of projects for developers.
In the post, Kremenek and the Swift development team note that the branch (subdivision) “preview” on GitHub of the language to be created on May 12th; the first preview will be made available to developers 4-6 weeks later. Despite clarifying that the cycle of new offers can be “irregular”, the team tries to follow this monthly periodicity to launch them.
Improvements in Swift version 3.0 include the Swift Package Manager, for the development and distribution of multi-platform packages (hi, Android, do you always come here?) and, for Linux, also be the first to contain the Swift Core Libraries (central libraries). Many other news are listed in the announcement post itself.
On the other hand, not everything is just flowers and, in order to make all these new features possible, it was necessary to make the decision not to make Swift 3.0 compatible with its previous versions including the current one (2.2). The fundamental changes in language and its Standard Library (standard library) are the main culprits for the disruption, which means more work for developers who want to keep their apps up to date with the latest version of Swift.
Swift 3.0 will be released, as stated above, at the end of the year, both on Swift.org and in a future version of Xcode (who knows 8.0?).
(via iClarified)
