Swift 5 Released!

Swift 5 Released!

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.

You can try out some of the new features in this playground put together by Paul Hudson.

Language Updates

Stable ABI and Binary Compatibility

The ABI is now declared stable for Swift 5 on Apple platforms. As a result, the Swift libraries are now incorporated into every macOS, iOS, tvOS, and watchOS release going forward. Your apps will be easier to build and smaller because they won’t have to include those libraries.

See these blog posts for more details:

• ABI Stability and More
• Evolving Swift On Apple Platforms After ABI Stability

Standard Library Updates

The standard library in Swift 5 includes the following new features:

• String reimplemented with UTF-8 encoding which can often result in faster code (See the UTF-8 String blog post for more background on this change)
• Improved support for raw text in string literals (See the String Literals blog post for more background on this refinement)
• Result and SIMD vector types added to the Standard Library
• Enhancements to String interpolation, adding more flexibility to construct text from data
• Performance improvements to Dictionary and Set

Swift 5 implements the following Standard Library proposals from the Swift Evolution process:

• SE-0200 Enhancing String Literals Delimiters to Support Raw Text
• 
SE-0211 Add Unicode Properties to Unicode.Scalar
• 
SE-0214 Renaming the DictionaryLiteral type to KeyValuePairs
• 
SE-0215 Conform Never to Equatable and Hashable
• 
SE-0218 Introduce compactMapValues to Dictionary
• 
SE-0221 Character Properties
• SE-0225 Adding isMultiple to BinaryInteger
• SE-0228 Fix ExpressibleByStringInterpolation
• SE-0229 SIMD Vectors
• SE-0232 Remove Some Customization Points from the Standard Library’s Collection Hierarchy
• SE-0233 Make Numeric Refine a new AdditiveArithmetic Protocol
• SE-0234 Remove Sequence.SubSequence
• SE-0235 Add Result to the Standard Library
• SE-0237 Introduce withContiguous{Mutable}StorageIfAvailable methods
• 
SE-0239 Add Codable conformance to Range types
• SE-0241 Deprecate String Index Encoded Offsets