We need long-term-support” (“LTS”) releases

[Douglas_Gregor]

@taylorswift

async / await in particular, tends to be used in the sort of real-time applications where a subtle stack-corruption bug could have the potential to inflict significant real-world harm. it is not enough to simply fix the issues at hand, and hope it will never happen again. bugs happen . already, the fact that the 5.5 toolchain made it to a public release, and is still available to download on swift.org, is likely to harm the reputation of the Swift language , and i fear that if we do not prioritize release stability, users will come to view Swift as unreliable.

I noted in the other thread that there's a lot of hyperbole going on, and it's counterproductive. You found a bug in an optimization pass for a brand new feature in its first release, and it had a significant impact on you personally. We're sorry that you ran into this problem, appreciate the bug report that made it easy to reproduce and diagnose the issue, and have a fix on hand.

As David has noted, a long-term-stable wouldn't actually help you at all. Either you wouldn't have had access to async functions because you were sticking with an old release, and a new version with new features can always have bugs.

Swift has dot releases that address bugs between major versions. You can see, for example, the timeline for 5.4.3 that picked up a few fixes and finished up around the same time 5.5 was released. For a serious issue such as the one in the thread that spawned this discussion, we'll put it in a dot release.

Doug