Hello everyone!
We're looking for members of the community to test drive some new features before release. If this is of interest to you then please continue reading to find out more!
Changes to be Released
There are two major features that are a part of this release:
- A new Swift Project Panel has been added to help manage aspects of your Swift project.
- Debugging workflows have received a major overhaul to be able to use the LLDB DAP extension provided by LLVM instead of CodeLLDB.
Swift Project Panel
A new tab was added to the VS Code Explorer View called Swift Project that allows you to view and manage dependencies, targets, tasks, and commands associated with your Swift project:
For more information, see the post about it on the Swift forums.
Debugging Workflows
The LLVM Project recently released the LLDB DAP extension that adds lldb-dap support to VS Code: an implementation of the debug adapter protocol using LLDB. The lldb-dap executable has been available starting in Swift 6 and will now be used by default to debug Swift executables.
CodeLLDB has been removed as a direct dependency to the Swift extension. However, it is still required for debugging in Swift 5.10 and earlier. The Swift extension will prompt you to install CodeLLDB when it is necessary to do so. A new setting called swift.debugger.debugAdapter has been added to allow you to configure your debug adapter if you would like to continue using CodeLLDB.
Additionally, we've simplified Swift launch configurations In order to make switching between LLDB DAP and CodeLLDB more seamless. Going forward, all Swift launch configurations will have the swift type regardless of which debug adapter you have selected in settings. You will be prompted one last time on startup to update your automatically generated launch configurations.
How Do I Participate?
The Swift extension for VS Code has started publishing pre-release versions to the VS Code marketplace. We have yet to decide on a cadence for pre-releases, but the intention is to get early builds in the hands of the community before an official release is tested and published.
VS Code makes switching between release and pre-release builds fairly straightforward. You'll now see a Switch to Pre-Release Version button when viewing the Swift extension in the VS Code extensions view. Clicking on this will install the latest pre-release version of the extension:
After clicking the button, it will be replaced by a button called Switch to Release Version that can be used to revert back to the latest release build.
I Found a Problem, Now What?
Submit any bugs or feature requests as new issues to the GitHub repository for the Swift extension. Please include the version number of the Swift extension that you are using. You can find this information in the Extensions View:
