Swift 5 Released (swift.org)

Ted Kremenek, a manager of the Languages and Runtimes team at Apple, writes: Swift 5 is now officially released! Swift 5 is a major milestone in the evolution of the language. Thanks to ABI stability, the Swift runtime is now included in current and future versions of Apple's platform operating systems: macOS, iOS, tvOS and watchOS. Swift 5 also introduces new capabilities that are building blocks for future versions, including a reimplementation of String, enforcement of exclusive access to memory during runtime, new data types, and support for dynamically callable types.

Comments

How is it forced?

[SuperKendall]

Oh sweet, another forced Xcode upgrade

How is this forced? You could keep using the current version of Xcode for quite a while.

In fact even after upgrading, nothing says you have to move to Swift 5 - you can keep compiling against the older Swift versions, and upgrade when it makes sense to you.

I've been using the beta version of Xcode off and on, and it didn't seem to break anything - I was able to compile my existing projects just fine with no changes.

Re:I can't wait!

[UnknowingFool]

I only coded briefly in Swift 2/3 and even I knew it wasn’t ABI stable. That was one of the complaints in why the Swift app size was much larger than ObjC versions. Sorry if this wasn’t clear to you but it is always a risk with a relatively new languages that they aren’t stable for a while. Even older languages break compatibility with new versions. Java 9 breaks a lot of things, and Java was 15 years old by then.