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Swift Programming Language Evolution

Before you initiate a pull request, please read the process document. Ideas should be thoroughly discussed on the swift-evolution mailing list first.

This repository tracks the ongoing evolution of Swift. It contains:

This document describes goals for the Swift language on a per-release basis, usually listing minor releases adding to the currently shipping version and one major release out. Each release will have many smaller features or changes independent of these larger goals, and not all goals are reached for each release.

Goals for past versions are included at the bottom of the document for historical purposes, but are not necessarily indicative of the features shipped. The release notes for each shipped version are the definitive list of notable changes in each release.

Development major version: Swift 4.0

Expected release date: Late 2017

The Swift 4 release is designed around two primary goals: to provide source stability for Swift 3 code and to provide ABI stability for the Swift standard library. To that end, the Swift 4 release will be divided into two stages.

Stage 1 focuses on the essentials required for source and ABI stability. Features that don't fundamentally change the ABI of existing language features or imply an ABI-breaking change to the standard library will not be considered in this stage. Swift 4 is currently only considering proposals that fit in Stage 1.

Stage 2 will commence once the implementation work on the Stage 1 features is cresting, and can contain a few other large and small features. We expect that stage 2 will commence some time in Spring 2017.

The high-priority features supporting Stage 1's source and ABI stability goals are:

  • Source stability features: the Swift language will need some accommodations to support code bases that target different language versions, to help Swift deliver on its source-compatibility goals while still enabling rapid progress.

  • Resilience: resilience provides a way for public APIs to evolve over time, while maintaining a stable ABI. For example, resilience eliminates the fragile base class problem that occurs in some object-oriented languages (e.g., C++) by describing the types of API changes that can be made without breaking ABI (e.g., "a new stored property or method can be added to a class").

  • Stabilizing the ABI: There are a ton of small details that need to be audited and improved in the code generation model, including interaction with the Swift runtime. While not specifically user-facing, the decisions here affect performance and (in some rare cases) the future evolution of Swift.

  • Generics improvements needed by the standard library: the standard library has a number of workarounds for language deficiencies, many of which manifest as extraneous underscored protocols and workarounds. If the underlying language deficiencies remain, they become a permanent part of the stable ABI. Conditional conformances, recursive protocol requirements, and where clauses for associated types are known to be in this category, but it's plausible that other features will be in scope if they would be used in the standard library.

  • String re-evaluation: String is one of the most important fundamental types in the language. Swift 4 seeks to make strings more powerful and easier-to-use, while retaining Unicode correctness by default.

  • Memory ownership model: an (opt-in) Cyclone/Rust-inspired memory ownership model is highly desired by systems programmers and for other high-performance applications that want predictable and deterministic performance. This feature will fundamentally shape the ABI, from low-level language concerns such as "inout" and low-level "addressors" to its impact on the standard library. While a full memory ownership model is likely too large for Swift 4 stage 1, we need a comprehensive design to understand how it will change the ABI.

Previous releases