1

Swift 5.5 is now officially released! Swift 5.5 is a massive release, which includes newly introduced language capabilities for concurrency, including async/await, structured concurrency, and Actors. My heartfelt thanks to the entire Swift community for all the active discussion, review, and iteration on the concurrency (and other additions) that make up the release. Thank you!

76 Likes
2

:rocket: :tada:
I'm happy, because now I can start migrating the vapor-telegram-bot to async await :clown_face:

5 Likes
3

Congrats. My gut feeling is that without Apple‘s hardware release cycle, it would have been a few months later with much less regressions, but anyways. Happy to see it moving forwards.

4

Is there any way to use async/await and the other concurrency features when targeting iOS 14?

5

Not yet. There's work underway, but the jury is still out on whether it will work out or not.

6

Good to hear, but also disappointing. In practical terms, we always have to support at least one major OS release back, which can make it challenging to adopt new technologies (SwiftUI improvements in iOS 15, desperately needed, are another example).

1 Like
7

I can feel your pain. It has been complained a lot about and I'm sure all of the Swift + OS-team engineers are aware of the situation for us app developers with lower deployment targets.

That said, even in the released version there are quite some bugs left, which I'd rather see fixed before spending energy in backwards deployment.

3 Likes
8

https://github.com/apple/swift/pull/39342

6 Likes
9

Note that this PR from Doug you linked is only part of the work needed to maybe get back deployment; see this thread where Doug explains it :slightly_smiling_face:
As Doug explain in this thread, there's still a lot to do with no guarantee that will even work given all the implications.

Doug also explained this in more details in this other thread; you might be interested in joining that other thread if you want to discuss or learn more about that specific back-deployment topic :slightly_smiling_face:

3 Likes