Hey Chris and team,
This is great news. Any news on when/if libdispatch linux compatibility
will ship with Swift 3?
Thanks again.
Haris
Hi Everyone,
As we get deeper into the Swift 3 release cycle, we’re beginning to have
a more precise understanding about what the release will shape up to be.
Ted posted details of the Swift 3 release process last week (
https://swift.org/blog/swift-3-0-release-process/\) and I just updated the
main swift-evolution README.md file (
https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution\) with some updated details about
the goals of Swift 3.
This release is shaping up to be a really phenomenal release that will
redefine the feel of Swift and make a major leap towards maturing the Swift
language and development experience. We have had a focus on getting to
source stability, with the forward-looking goal of making Swift 4 as source
compatible with Swift 3 as we can reasonably accomplish. It tackled API
naming head on (which is one of the hardest problems in computer science
[1]), made major improvements to the consistency and feel of the language,
and has several nice across the board additions.
That said, it is also clear at this point that some of the loftier goals
that we started out with aren’t going to fit into the release - including
some of the most important generics features needed in order to lock down
the ABI of the standard library. As such, the generics and ABI stability
goals will roll into a future release of Swift, where I expect them to be
the *highest* priority features to get done.
I expect discussion and planning for Swift 3.x and Swift 4 to start
sometime around August of this year. Until then, it is very important that
we as a community stay focused on the goals of Swift 3: I’d really prefer
us all to resist the urge to discuss major blue sky features for future
releases. We would also like to put a significant amount of effort into bug
fixing and quality refinements as well, which means that the core team will
be proactively deferring evolution proposals to later releases that don’t
align with the Swift 3 goals, especially those that are strictly additive.
Thank you for all of the amazing community that has developed on this
list, it is great to work with you all! Let us know if you have any
questions,
-Chris
[1] It is well known that the two hard problems in Computer Science are
naming, cache invalidation, and off-by-one errors.