Hello, Swift community.
The review of SE-0246: Generic Math(s) Functions ran from March 11th â 20th, 2019, and it was subsequently accepted by the Core Team.[1] The implementation ran into problems with source breakage and type-checker performance, and it was never successfully integrated into a release of the Swift standard library. However, the proposed functionality has long been part of the Swift Numerics package.
When evolution proposals are accepted or rejected, that decision is made in a specific context. If a proposal goes a long time without being implemented, that context will have changed, and it is appropriate to ask whether the proposal still makes sense. It is for this reason that proposal acceptances are considered to expire after a certain period of time. The Language Steering Group sets that period at one year, and while there might be some "squish" to that, it's been seven full years since the acceptance of SE-0246. The LSG has been cleaning up some of these old proposal statuses, and we have decided to finally mark SE-0246 as officially expired.
Expiration is not the same as rejection. There's no reason we can't consider the content of SE-0246 again, if we find that it can be implemented without the problems we've run into in the past. But we would need to consider it afresh in a new review, and not just fall back on a seven-year-old decision.
John McCall
Review Manager
This was prior to the creation of the separate Language Steering Group that reviews language and standard library evolution proposals. âŠī¸