Apple Releases First Preview of Swift 3.0 (macrumors.com)

DaGoatSpanka quotes a report from MacRumors: Apple yesterday released the first preview build of Swift 3.0, a major update to Apple's open source Swift programming language. Swift 3.0's official release is expected to come in late 2016 after proposed changes are finalized. The Swift 3.0 preview can be downloaded from the official Swift website. There are versions of Swift 3.0 available for Xcode 7.2, Ubuntu 14.04, and Ubuntu 15.10. [Swift 3.0 is not source compatible with Swift 2.2 as it introduces source-breaking changes, but going forward, the goal is to make Swift 3.0 source compatible with future Swift language updates.] Swift 3.0 will likely be shown at Apple's upcoming Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC).

Comments

Lots of choices.

[fyngyrz]

I write applications (big ones) for OS X using c and c++. Targeting 10.6.8, my code still works fine under 10.11 today. It ports to Windows easily as well. Re Windows, targeting XP, it all works right up to the current version of Windows. XP broke the OS windowing metrics, otherwise my stuff would still work with Win98. :) Apple hasn't done anything quite that stupid. Well, yet. 10.6.8 is where 64-bit code began to work; and it's the last OS X that supports PPC (my HP calculator emulation, bunch of audio drivers, my old mame (which is actually fairly important to me, because some of those games are my code, and code from close friends in the day, and I want that stuff to work as long as possible), all kinds of stuff in Appleworks, etc., etc. So 10.6.8 is where I planted my flag, so to speak.

Of course if you decide Swift or Objective C is your chosen coding mechanism, that's fine, but there's no externally imposed requirement that it must be your coding mechanism; at the worst, a few boilerplate intermediate layers based on basic OS APIs will do ya.

Sometimes -- for instance, with Apple's OS file dialogs -- the stuff Apple supplies is either broken, feature-poor, or both. After being bitten over and over by that stupid file dialog, I spent an afternoon and wrote my own. Which works a damn sight better, and faster, and with less hangups than Apple's does. My users benefit a great deal from my unwillingness to let Apple screw them with the bug-infested trail of tears they leave behind them as they blunder onwards into their new and shinier future.

Same thing for most (all?) of Apple and Microsoft's "new and shiny." For every new thing you decide you depend on in the OS, you're leaving users behind, and making your code more and more dependent upon Apple's latest whim.

Which, again, you can do, absolutely -- but you don't have to.

Almost every time I see some application that "requires" some fairly late version of an operating system, I think dark thoughts. There are few things, particularly things that are focused upon new features, where it is likely reasonable. But mostly... not. Mostly it's just thoughtless development where the user takes a back seat to... let's face it: "shiny."