Swift 6, the newest model of the general-purpose language developed by Apple, is now accessible. The language replace options concurrency enhancements, together with prolonged security ensures for knowledge races. Linux and Windows assist and a brand new testing library are additionally featured.
Published September 16, the replace could be downloaded from Swift.org. For the language and customary library, a brand new opt-in language mode extends security ensures by diagnosing potential knowledge races in code as compiler errors. Data-race security checks beforehand had been accessible as warnings in Swift 5.10, launched March 5. Additionally, there are fewer false positives on Swift warnings because of an improved Sendable inference and new compiler evaluation for transferring mutable state from one actor to a different. Version 6 additionally features a synchronization library for low-level concurrency APIs, together with atomic operations and a mutex API. These and different updates in Swift 6 mark the beginning of a journey to make data-race security dramatically simpler, in keeping with the announcement posted on September 17.
For Linux and Windows, Swift 6 unifies the implementation of Foundation, for accessing knowledge varieties, collections, and working techniques, throughout all platforms. MacOS and iOS have used the Swift implementation of Foundation since Swift 5.9, launched final yr. Swift 6 brings these enhancements to Windows and Linux. For Linux, Swift 6 gives official testing and assist for Debian and Fedora, together with Ubuntu 24.04. Fully statically linked executables are additionally provided for Linux. And, for Windows, pre-built toolchains can be found for the arm64 structure, bringing improved compiler efficiency for Windows on Arm hosts. Also in Swift 6, the bundle supervisor parallelizes builds throughout a number of cores on Windows by default, which might enhance efficiency on a 10-core machine by as a lot as 10 occasions, in keeping with the announcement.
