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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.
It's great that Swift has finally got ABI compatibility, the main benefit to start it an easier time distributing frameworks that can be dynamically loaded.
Another great aspect of Swift 5 is that you can still build apps all the way back to iOS 11 (maybe earlier). So you can still convert apps to use the latest Swift without worrying about excluding users that prefer to wait for a while before upgrading (though the practical reality is that after a year, almost all iOS users have upgraded).
One interesting change that happened with Swift 5 is that it switched internally from storing Strings as UTF-16, to UTF-8 - it helps performance and bridging to languages like C.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Oh sweet, another forced Xcode upgrade that will no doubt bust up all my app's existing code and require hours of effort to get back to where I was again! Thanks Apple!
On the other hand, while iOS/macOS don't have the biggest marketshare, they do have the users with the most cash.
So if you want to code for a living, you can't ignore those users.
#DeleteFacebook
Pretty sure it's actually back to iOS10 in fact... If I may ask, why do you stick with iOS7? That is a curious choice. There's a lot of benefit from newer OS versions, and they don't even include anything older than iOS9 on most iOS version share trackers I have seen...
Various versions of iOS 10 - 12 are around 90% of iOS users.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I'm sure it *is* a press release. Probably based on one posted on a web page.
I didn't follow any links, because every time I've checked swift didn't work reasonably on Linux. (IIRC, there were officially declared ways to do it, but scant documentation of them, and little explanation of what you'd actually end up with if you did them. And no reports from any Linux users who had done that and were happy with the results. Objective C had much better compatibility...of course, that one didn't start with Apple.)
FWIW, I've always regretted that Objective C didn't have a better Linux support community, one good enough that learning the language would have been worthwhile. Swift evokes only a shadow of that reaction.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
FWIW, I've always regretted that Objective C didn't have a better Linux support community,
Agreed, it was a great language.
The noisiest complaint people had of Objective C is that it had all the baggage of C. But then swift has all the baggage of Objective C and C, but without the elegance of Smalltalk. Oh well.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The number of jobs for "badass Linux kernel hacker" is much lower than "app developer for iPhones, iPads and Macs".
#DeleteFacebook
Are you serious? "all the way back to iOS 11"? Dude, iOS 11 is barely 1.5 year old!
I do my best to support actually old versions with my apps (for amateur astronomers) - I was able to support iOS 6 until last summer (Apple stopped allowing it), new versions of my apps support as far back as iOS 7, which is not easy if you want to fully support new devices as well, but there are ways to do it. I do get some thank you messages from iOS 7 or iOS 9 users (mainly people with devices such as iPhone 4S, iPad 2 who can't update), so I think that's worth the effort.
Sure, I could go for the majority of users, if I limited to iOS 11 I'd get almost 90% of users and make it much easier for me, but I care about all of my users and try to serve as many as I can. Their devices are perfectly fine, why should they be excluded from new software?
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Are they still changing the UUID almost every release?
I made a plug-in for Xcode and released it as open source a few years ago. Almost every time an Xcode release came out I'd get a request saying that plug-in stopped working. This is because as part of the configuration of the plug-in you specify the UUIDs of Xcode the plug-in works with. The new release doesn't match and so the plug-in doesn't work. An error code shows up in the log and it's easy to find out what has happened.
It was like dealing with a bunch of kids. If I didn't have an update done the morning of the release I would get complaints FFS. This despite leaving instructions on how to fix the issue and multiple fixed requests with explanations on the exact same thing. I bet they would complain if their users would do the same to them.