Firstly, thanks to the Swift Team for their continued hard work to push Swift forward to what Swift has become today. It's an effort which has involved a lot of blood, sweat and tears! I know that there are some grumblings sometimes on the forums but everyone really does appreciate how hard everyone back at base is pushing.
I also want to congratulate @compnerd and @tomerd for their well deserved promotions into the core team. Both of your contributions have been outstanding and very welcome. I can't wait to see where you take us next!
@tkremenek thanks for giving us this outline of what's going on in the depths of the ongoing development of Swift. Obviously not everything can't be worked on all at once and priorities have to be planned out and tradeoffs made. I think the direction you have outlined makes sense in the grand scheme of things, even if everyone has their own little feature they are really looking forward to and want sooner than other things.
I do have to raise one point though; whilst its true that everything is out in the open on Github, and its one of the places I look every few weeks to see what's going on, it's still not immediately obvious as to what's being worked on at any one time. A lot of the PRs need some kind of context as to how they fit in to the big picture. I'm not a compiler engineer, and whilst I understand the high level concepts, the nitty gritty is something that alludes me and to tell you the truth I don't really have the spare time to learn.
Whilst I really do appreciate the openness of future plans, what's being worked on now etc. in this post, I think it would be nice to have some place to see what high level features are being worked on at any one time. I'm not saying to use Trello, but something like that which only needs to get updated once every few weeks would be very useful to give context to a lot of the work being done behind the scenes. It would allow the general Swift community, even people who don't actively get involved with the community, to have a quick overall view of what's being worked on, what's in the pipeline, roughly what's being earmarked for what version etc.
I visit the forums fairly regularly and recently I was feeling a bit lost into the overall direction that the language was taking. I understand that this is because the concentration of work has been about under the skin improvements, but that's just not visible to the average Swift user until its actually released or a blog post is written about it (which are greatly appreciated but quite few and far between). I think exposing the under the skin improvements at a high level would give the community a greater appreciation of what's going on and for people like myself, not feel as lost.
Anyway, thanks for jumping in and giving some valuable insights as to what's planned for the next year or so, its greatly appreciated.
