iOS WWDC 2023 - Are we likely to see a new version of Swift?

[Cromulent]

I'm learning Swift at the moment (Swift 5.8), and I'm curious whether people expect a new version of Swift to be announced at WWDC.

Do you think it'll happen, and if so, what would you like to see?

 

[MisterSavage]

If I remember correctly there's always lots of changes for SwiftUI, but I don't remember lots of changes to Swift itself necessarily being a WWDC announcement.

I'd like a "Swift Data" to use instead of Core Data.

 

[Cromulent]

If I remember correctly there's always lots of changes for SwiftUI, but I don't remember lots of changes to Swift itself necessarily being a WWDC announcement.

I'd like a "Swift Data" to use instead of Core Data.

Ah, I see. Thank you. It'll certainly be interesting as this will be my first WWDC where I understand some things.

 

[MisterSavage]

Ah, I see. Thank you. It'll certainly be interesting as this will be my first WWDC where I understand some things.

It's exciting but can also be completely overwhelming but it's just a firehose of new things to see/try. I try to keep the mindset that it's not a race and learn what I can when I can.

 

[casperes1996]

There's often been talks like "What's New in Swift", but they don't necessarily coincide with new releases of Swift. They may just summarise what happened in the Swift releases since last WWDC. Sometimes releases do coincide though

Can't really think of language features I want from Swift that aren't in there already though. Tooling around it on the other hand - GitHub Copilot working with Xcode for one thing could be rather sweet. Also, Xcode launching faster and the previews reloading faster. Given how many extensions I have and how much is interpreted, it's almost shameful that VSCode with a web based project can launch so much faster and recompile my SvelteKit to reload the preview in the watching browser as quickly as it can compared to Xcode being so slow for native projects. Though I do have respect for it being more difficult to show a quick preview when you need to compile to native vs. the simple Svelte(TS)->JS compilation the web project needs to do. So it's mainly the launch times that's a real concern that can be feasibly addressed.

 

[BadMacRumours]

There's often been talks like "What's New in Swift", but they don't necessarily coincide with new releases of Swift. They may just summarise what happened in the Swift releases since last WWDC. Sometimes releases do coincide though

Can't really think of language features I want from Swift that aren't in there already though. Tooling around it on the other hand - GitHub Copilot working with Xcode for one thing could be rather sweet. Also, Xcode launching faster and the previews reloading faster. Given how many extensions I have and how much is interpreted, it's almost shameful that VSCode with a web based project can launch so much faster and recompile my SvelteKit to reload the preview in the watching browser as quickly as it can compared to Xcode being so slow for native projects. Though I do have respect for it being more difficult to show a quick preview when you need to compile to native vs. the simple Svelte(TS)->JS compilation the web project needs to do. So it's mainly the launch times that's a real concern that can be feasibly addressed.

You should read the privacy policy for Copilot. I wouldn't go near it with a 200 foot pole.

 

[Spaceboi Scaphandre]

I'm surprised we didn't get any big changes to Swift last year since WWDC 22's logo was the Swift logo

 

[SexExpert]

I'm surprised we didn't get any big changes to Swift last year since WWDC 22's logo was the Swift logo

There were tons of big changes to Swift last year...actors, async/await and the other concurrency stuff are massive, and there were loads of major changes to make generics and protocols more intuitive for new users.

The development of swift is public, just read the blog or visit the evolution forums at swift.org. The important stuffs we're likely to see at WWDC 2023 are more generics improvements, macros, regex apis and regex-builders, and if we're lucky, the beginnings of variadic generics. If you're feeling brave, you could even contribute to the discussions and change the course of swift yourself

I still want to see xcode get decent refactoring tools. Once you get used to something like ReSharper/Ryder or even VS's tools these days, being stuck with xcode's offerings is *painful*, and with a type system as strong as swift's, there's not really any excuse.