This Week in Swift  May 23rd 2016

Winding down the Swift 3 release

The note from @clattner_llvm on the Swift 3.0 release:

"This release is shaping up to be a really phenomenal release that will redefine the feel of Swift and make a major leap towards maturing the Swift language and development experience. We have had a focus on getting to source stability, with the forward-looking goal of making Swift 4 as source compatible with Swift 3 as we can reasonably accomplish. It tackled API naming head on (which is one of the hardest problems in computer science), made major improvements to the consistency and feel of the language, and has several nice across the board additions.

That said, it is also clear at this point that some of the loftier goals that we started out with aren’t going to fit into the release - including some of the most important generics features needed in order to lock down the ABI of the standard library. As such, the generics and ABI stability goals will roll into a future release of Swift, where I expect them to be the highest priority features to get done."

If you're still upset about the lack of ABI stability, make sure to read this reply from Greg Parker on mistakes made in Objective-C that weren't changed because of ABI stability.

"A late ABI is only late until it's finished; a bad ABI is bad forever" - @jckarter

[SE-0088]: Modernize libdispatch for Swift 3 naming conventions

This:

let queue = dispatch_queue_create("com.test.myqueue", nil)
dispatch_async(queue) {
    print("Hello World")
}

Will now be:

let queue = DispatchQueue(label: "com.test.myqueue")
queue.asynchronously {
    print("Hello World")
}