Apple Releases Swift 3.0, 'Not Source-Compatibile With Swift 2.3' (infoworld.com)

An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes InfoWorld: "Move fast and break things," the saying goes. Apple does both with the 3.0 version of its Swift programming language...its first full point revision since it became an open source project... In a blog post detailing the full body of changes for Swift 3.0, Apple singled out the two biggest breaking changes. The first is better translation of Objective-C APIs into Swift, meaning that code imported from Objective-C and translated into Swift will be more readable and Swift-like. The bad news is any code previously imported from Objective-C into Swift will not work in Swift 3; it will need to be re-imported.

The other major change... Most every item referenced in the standard library has been renamed to be less wordy. But again, this brings bad news for anyone with an existing Swift codebase: Apple says "the proposed changes are massively source-breaking for Swift code, and will require a migrator to translate Swift 2 code into Swift 3 code."
Apple will provide migration tools in version 8.0 of their XCode IDE, "but such tools go only so far," notes the article, questioning what will happen to the Linux and Windows ports of Swift.

Comments

Re:One word: meme

[Anonymous Coward]

I know I'll get mod downed for this, since this is article is being guarded by Apple's brightest nerds, but seriously, this DID NOT TAKE COURAGE on Apple's part! Can we have the word "COURAGE" back please, and use it when it's actually appropriate?

Here, look at the Google definitions for the word courage:
"the ability to do something that frightens one." -- So was it frightening for Apple to release this update? NO!!!
"strength in the face of pain or grief." -- Yeah, you can see how this does NOT apply at all to anything Apple has done...

And something from a year ago is a dinosaur? OK... That's a rather gross exaggeration.

Re:Swift is always doing non compat updates

[pushing-robot]

The language just turned two years old, and they've been saying for a while that the language wouldn't be 'stable' until version 3.0.

Nothing is perfect on day one, after all, and Swift borrowed a lot of terribly ugly library methods from Obj-C to make the transition easier. Cleaning all that up for 3.0 will cause some short-term headaches but make future code a lot less cumbersome.

Hopefully from here on the changes will be relatively minor.

Re:Then use Swift

[goose-incarnated]

Since Swift is open source, it's already been ported to many platforms. It's on Linux (which Apple officially supported) and Windows and even Android now...

So is DOSBox. Doesn't mean much. The reason it hasn't been forked is because there simply isn't enough interest in it from people with the technical ability to fork it.

If you are ignoring Swift because of your irrational hatred of Apple, you are only hurting yourself and your future employability.

I dunno hey - I soundly ignored iOS, Obj-C and all Apple development and it hasn't done anything to my employability at all. I expect similar by soundly ignoring Swift.

But I do thank you for making it even easier for me to find work.

Personally I'm not in competition with you - I do (and have done) s/ware development on more than a single manufacturers products. I'm flexible. The amount of non-Apple development work out there dwarfs the Apple-only development work. Hell, the Apple-only work being offered is so tiny I doubt it even makes a margin-of-error difference? Maybe four orders of magnitude difference? Less?