# Swift Evolution Process
Swift is a powerful and intuitive programming language that is designed to make writing and maintaining correct programs easier. Swift is growing and evolving, guided by a community-driven process referred to as the Swift evolution process, maintained by the [Language Steering Group][language-steering-group]. This document outlines the Swift evolution process and how a feature grows from a rough idea into something that can improve the Swift development experience for millions of programmers.
## Scope
The Swift evolution process covers all design changes, no matter how small, to the Swift language, its standard library, and the core tools necessary to build Swift programs. This includes additions, removals, and changes to:
- the features of the Swift language,
- the public interface of the Swift standard library,
- the configuration of the Swift compiler, and
- the core tools of the Swift package ecosystem, including the configuration of the [Swift package manager](https://www.swift.org/package-manager/) and the design of its manifest files.
The design of other tools, such as IDEs, debuggers, and documentation generators, is not covered by the evolution process. The Core Team may create workgroups to guide and make recommendations about the development of these tools, but the output of those workgroups is not reviewed.
The evolution process does not cover experimental features, which can be added, changed, or removed at any time. Implementors should take steps to prevent the accidental use of experimental features, such as by enabling them only under explicitly experimental options. Features should not be allowed to remain perpetually experimental; a feature with no clear path for development into an official feature should be removed.
Changes such as bug fixes, optimizations, or diagnostic improvements can be contributed via the normal contribution process; see [Contributing to Swift](https://www.swift.org/contributing/). Some bug fixes are effectively substantial changes to the design, even if they're just making the implementation match the official documentation; whether such a change requires evolution review is up to the appropriate evolution workgroup.
Which parts of the Swift project are covered by the evolution process is ultimately up to the judgment of the Core Team.
This file has been truncated. show original
