What’s New in Swift, Issue 3

Swift on Windows

One thing I have always found very interesting about the Swift project is the community support for various development platforms.  One platform that I have found particularly interesting is support for Windows. At first, when I thought about Swift on Windows it made me pause coming from a macOS and iOS perspective.  Swift on the Server though makes a lot of sense for Windows as Windows still does remain large server side development platform. In the last few weeks I have been seeing a lot of community support going into the Swift project for Windows.  Just thought I would list of a few of them here as I always find this cool.

1. https://github.com/apple/swift/pull/21415
2. https://github.com/apple/swift/pull/21423
3. https://github.com/apple/swift/pull/21424
4. https://github.com/apple/swift/pull/21442

AlamoFire 5 Beta is Taking Shape

A lot of work is being done on the AlamoFire project to test out the new beta and to start pulling changes from 4.* branches.  This is great news because this means that soon the 5.0 beta should be tested enough for a release candidate. I will keep my eye on this but in the meantime I would encourage you to head on over to the AlamoFire project and test out the Beta 5 release and report anything you see.

1. https://github.com/Alamofire/Alamofire/releases/tag/5.0.0.beta.1
2. https://github.com/Alamofire/Alamofire/pull/2689

Swift stdlib available in Swiftmodule Directories on Apple Platforms

Interesting PR put in by Jordan Rose for Swift to reference the stdlib from the swiftmodule directory, if available, on an Apple platform.  On this PR, Jordan referenced that the discussion is forthcoming, but I thought this was an interesting change that was worth noting on how the Swift stdlib may be in the future split up and available as modules.

1. https://github.com/apple/swift/pull/21797

SR-8649 Range Types Conform to Codable

Very cool PR that was just merged into Swift a few days ago to make sure Range types conform to codable.  This is a PR that has been in the works since September and a lot of the Swift Core team and members of the community have contributed on the review of this PR.  Very Cool!

1. https://github.com/apple/swift/pull/19532#pullrequestreview-180033082
2. https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution/pull/915

Introduce C Parser Library

A few days ago a PR was put into the Swift project to introduce a shared library with a C API to be used by SwiftSyntax to speed-up source code parsing.  This “code” mean a performance improvement to how Swift syntax trees are parsed in the future. The code committed in this PR, a mix of C and CPP is very cool, I highly suggest looking at it if you are interested.

1. https://github.com/apple/swift/pull/21762
2. https://github.com/apple/swift-syntax

Swift Community Podcast

A new podcast with a revolving set of hosts has been announced called the Swift Community Podcast.  This podcast will take a look at what is happening in the Swift Community from all different angles.  On the initial episode John Sundell, Garric Nahapetian and Chris Lattner introduce the concept of the show and why it was created.  Eager to see where this will go.

1. https://www.swiftcommunitypodcast.org/