Swift 6.4 Released

boxed

I really hope the debugger improvements are noticeable. The number of times I've stopped in a debugger and I can't see the variables I want to look at has been extremely high.

afavour

I didn’t realise Swift in WebAssembly has come as far as it has. I’ll be interested to try it out, I’ve used Rust before now but Swift is definitely easier to work with.

bnchrch

Happy to see Swift progress. Its a beautiful language and well thought out. Would love to see it expand outside of iOS

airstrafer

A very solid release with very nice immediate conveniences/improvements and foundational long term work. I’m particularly impressed at the team’s continued investment in non-Apple platforms. IMO, true cross platform Swift codebases still seems out of reach for most shops. But if they keep this up for a few more years then Swift could become a very compelling cross platform language — for both systems and application programming. The big hurdle they need to figure out is the standard library and especially SwiftUI. SwiftUI is the single most important library that essentially all Apple swift codebases use, so until there is a real cross platform SwiftUI then for app programming IMO Swift will remain a novelty. There are other frameworks, like eg Network.framework, which really should be in the stdlib as well.

asimovDev

Anyone have experience with embedded Swift or know any interesting embedded projects running on Swift?

adamnemecek

Looking at things like this ``` let result = try await Subprocess.run( .name("ls"), arguments: ["-la"], output: .string(limit: 4096) ) print(result.standardOutput)` ``` reminds me that macOS could really use something like powershell (I know you can run powershell on macOS) where you pass around structured data, rather than the endless parsing and reparsing. This is mostly a feature of the shell but you do need some language infrastructure to accomplish it.

wslh

I just realized Swift has support for embedded hardware [1]. It's very niche but having a high level programming language as Swift is a great option. [1] https://github.com/swiftlang/swift-embedded-examples/blob/ma...

Decabytes

Yes to the subprocess 1.0. CommandLine utils are how I try out any new language. I feel like Swift hits the sweet spot for me in terms of safety, cross platform capability, ahead of time compilation, and automatic memory management compared to other languages currently available.

tancop

I love the friendly competition between Swift, Rust and Zig. Swift has been adding borrow checking features for a while, now they also have arenas, better C interop and more language support for non GC platforms.

busymom0

I am building the backend of a social media app I am making in Swift. I've previously used Vapor for the web server but right now, I am trying out Hummimgbird. Has anyone tried either? Would love to hear your experience with them.

elpakal

Man I can't count the number of shell wrappers I've written or reached out to over my career. Looking forward to having an official Swift SubProcess helper.

myHNAccount123

This is a very impressive release. The continued type checker improvements are amazing, improved memory safety helping to expose hidden traps, improved debugging, improved dev experience for Android. Great job!

Ta_Panters

Its really a shame Swift had to be the Apple language, it is really very nicely made

lemonginger

As a coder of 30+ years in various other languages that sincerely wants to learn Swift can someone please help me understand why it is not diametrically opposed for a company to suggest, effectively in the same breath no less, that I should learn to code Swift myself and/or just have some AI do it? Every time I set out to learn I just feel like I'm being an idiot because in a year, or now, nobody will hand code anything. And even if we still reckon that some knowledge will be required to verify the voluminous output of AI there is now a vast moat of Jr. unemployability that has arisen making it exponentially harder to justify learning to code in the first place? groan