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

what did they break this time

[Anonymous Coward]

Last release broke for loops, what was broken now? If statements??

Re:what did they break this time

[pushing-robot]

No, function calls.

https://www.hackingwithswift.c...

Yes, it'll make code shorter and simpler, but renaming most library methods is still a kick in the teeth to developers.

Re:what did they break this time

[Beezlebub33]

And enums, apparently.

I understand having it consistent (which is their argument for the changes), but this just means that they they screwed it up in 1 and 2. Seriously, you change naming conventions from UpperCamelCase to lowerCamelCase? Now? That's the sort of decision that should be made (with reasons) when you are designing the language the first time; and then you have a group of really nitpicky, anal-retentive types go through the language to check for all the inconsistencies, and then you fix them, and then you release it. This whole thing screams amateur hour; yeah, I understand it a little more when python says 'oops, we messed up because there was a single guy who designed the language, and he didn't have a team behind him'. However, this is frigging Apple, and they have lots of people and money, and Swift was (I hope??) intended from pretty early on to be where people were going to go, so it should have been done right the first time or two.

Re:what did they break this time

[pushing-robot]

Swift inherited this mess from Objective-C. The Swift team stuck with the old conventions for a while to make the transition easier, but now they want to shed the ugly bits and move forward. I'm not sure there's a better way they could have handled this, to be honest. Everything has tradeoffs.

Re:what did they break this time

[Maury Markowitz]

Clearly all the people complaining don't actually use Swift for production code and/or just like to complain.

I converted my antenna modelling project to 3.0 in about three minutes. Most of this was due to the new selector syntax, which I had to spend time looking up on Stackoverflow. The rest was trivial, and my code is cleaner and shorter than ever.

Re:Same happens for open source languages!

[110010001000]

C++ advances and still maintains backward compatibility. It does matter. If you learned C++ 10 years ago, that knowledge still applies today. Swift 2.2 was released in MARCH 16, 2016, and is already obsolete. Ridiculous.

Re:Same happens for open source languages!

[OzPeter]

C++ advances and still maintains backward compatibility. It does matter. If you learned C++ 10 years ago, that knowledge still applies today.

There have been breaking changes in C++ in the past.

Swift 2.2 was released in MARCH 16, 2016, and is already obsolete. Ridiculous.

Hardly obsolete. No-one is saying you now can't still write Swift in 2.2 or even 1. Swift is not included in iOS and is instead bundled with the App that uses it. You just need to use the tooling version that supports your desired Swift version.