The holiday season is just around the corner. Most of us enjoy Thanksgiving right before Christmas. For others, the festivities start after Christmas and continue even after New Year’s Eve. Despite the differences, we should all enjoy some time off with our families and friends and for this period, merge access will be locked down in Swift. Check out the holiday schedule and plan your work accordingly.

There is a new feature in Xcode 13.2 beta which makes build times much faster by using more CPU cores. This new build system is opt-in, so you’ll have to enable it.

Before we jump into other detailed news, I would like to express my gratitude to our sponsors who have helped us to run this project for the rest of the year. We would not be here without your support.

How have the last two weeks been for all of you? Personally, I’ve felt a slight decrease in my working capacity due to lack of daylight and the falling temperatures. By the way, does your country use daylight savings time?

The Xcode 13.2 Beta has concurrency support, which should help to resolve a certain kind of pain-point for many Swift developers. Perhaps the most important benefit of Swift’s built-in concurrency system is that it allows performing multiple asynchronous tasks in parallel in a much easier way. I can only imagine how much time we’ll save by speeding up performing tasks.

It is with great pleasure that I write how terrific the last three years of running this newsletter have been. I’ve met so many incredible people, and thanks to all of you, I have learned so much! This is the reason why typing the following sentence fills me with emotion. Issue 200 will be the last newsletter I run. I have decided to step away from leading this project, and with joyful excitement, I am looking for someone who would like to continue running things.

Let me start with some very exciting news - our Swift Weekly Brief has been translated into the Chinese language. You can explore translations here. I am thrilled to share this with all of you as I truly believe that reaching more people from around the world who can make an impressive contribution to our community is our way to broaden horizons leading to new inventions.

Meanwhile, Apple hosted its ‘Unleashed’ event and announced some new impressive hardware, satisfying everyone’s taste. Kids will soon be asking Santa for new AirPods and a colorful HomePod Mini to put under Christmas trees later this year, and professional artists are enthusiastic about new powerful MacBook Pros with Apple’s new chips, either the M1 Pro or M1 Max, with four-wheel-drive versions of the M1 chip they presented last fall. Let me know your thoughts about these new machines. Personally, I am looking forward to the 14-inch desktop as it perfectly fits my needs.

Just a kind reminder that we have various opportunities for sponsorship to help us run this project. You can always find more info about the options here. Also, I would like to give a shout-out to our current sponsors - we are grateful and appreciate your support.

We’re starting today’s newsletter with some hiring news from Apple: they are looking for paid interns for their language, compiler and debugger teams. Even if you don’t have experience in the specific field, interested students are encouraged to apply anyway. If you’d like to understand better how internships work, have a look at this insightful article about Amritpan Kaur’s path through Compiler Development and Language Design.

There have been some really nice improvements made to Swift.org recently, including support for dark mode. For those of you using dark mode on iOS, the website will automatically switch modes to match. I hope you’re enjoying this feature as much as I am.

As always, I want to express our appreciation for the support from our sponsors. Without you this newsletter wouldn’t exist, so thank you very much. If anyone else is interested in sponsorship, please kindly get in touch. More information on how you could participate in our project can be found here.

How many of you have pre-ordered the new iPhone 13? Tomorrow is the big day, when we can see the new device hit the store shelves. Apple claims that the new iPhone has a brand new dual-camera system, a super-fast A15 chip and a massive leap in battery life.

But we are here not only for the new and pretty iPhone colors – Xcode 13.0 was released just a couple of days ago along with Swift 5.5. Here’s a listing of Swift 5.5 updates. This is a big release, and it includes quite a few new features. The iOS 13.0 release notes can be found here. And the work to back-deploy concurrency features to older Swift versions has begun.

To keep running this project and send you this newsletter, we are inviting sponsors to reach out. Your support is very much appreciated and helps us cover the platform costs.

Thanks to everyone involved and let’s get straight to the news.

California streaming. We all know what that means: a big day is coming next week - Apple has announced an event on September 14! They hid an easter egg inside the event invitation - a hidden AR experience, and it looks pretty cool. This also allowed fans across the globe to speculate about what upcoming products Apple is going to announce. It was suggested that the rose gold color of the skies inside the portal gives us the first glance of the new iPhone’s colors. Well, we’ll find out in less than a week.

The last two weeks have been full of activities in the Swift community. Many proposals are being generated in Swift evolution; some have been accepted or returned, and some are still in review. These proposals help to facilitate Swift remaining a modern language, so let’s keep them rolling!

I want to thank everyone in the Swift community involved in this project. If you want to support our newsletter financially, please reach out as we have a few sponsorship slots available.

This week I spoke at the 360iDev conference. I enjoy going to conferences and meeting fellow community members, but it is tough to do it in a remote environment. The organizers did a tremendous job to facilitate both worlds this year. Thank you!

The last two weeks were relatively silent in the open-source Swift world. But we have news that one of the maintainers of this newsletter, Bas Broek, might join this project in the future. :) If you want to participate by helping out or writing an issue, just reach out to us. This is by no means a personal project.

We have sponsorship availability for upcoming dates. Your support would be greatly appreciated by more than 10K Twitter followers and 4.5K newsletter subscribers! Head down here to learn more about how you could support this project. Thank you!

Have you noticed how the last two weeks have been pretty low-key for the Swift community? I feel this is a lull before the storm of September comes and we all know what that means. Folks are holding their breath, eager to find out news from Apple.

Personally, this time is quite challenging for me as I am getting ready to take the stage at 360iDev conference. Unfortunately, the US hasn’t opened their borders yet, even for fully vaccinated people, so I’m participating online this time. But despite not being able to meet old friends and make new friends in person, I’m truly looking forward to connecting with people and sharing my experience using Swift for rapid development. Let me know if you’re participating in 360iDev and let’s meet up!

For those of you who want to give back to community and support the Swift Weekly Brief, we are open for sponsors.

Thank you Jeroen for covering last week’s issue. If you want to contribute or write an issue, head down to our contributions guide or let me know personally.

The slow summer trend is also continuing these past two weeks. Despite that, there are a bunch of accepted proposals and some fresh ideas on the Swift forums.

As always, I appreciate your support. Now let’s get to the news.

Kristaps has asked me to take over the writing for this week. It seems that Swift proposals and pitches have slowed down a little bit for now. Is this due to summer in the northern hemisphere or people having fun with the current beta releases by Apple? Who knows. I do know everything happens in cycles and my guess is that things will pick up again. Enjoy this week’s links and information.

Swift Weekly is looking for sponsors. If your company or someone you know would like to sponsor this community-driven project, reach out! Thank you!

It seems that WWDC21 has settled down, and people are starting to enjoy the summer. But Swift’s core team hasn’t stopped working, and there are quite a few proposals in review as well as accepted.

This issue of Swift Weekly brings some sad news because the Swift Unwrapped podcast has ended. I want to personally say thanks to Jesse Squires and JP Simard for running Swift Unwrapped for so long - 4.5 years and 92 episodes. It was a wild ride, and I learned a ton. Thank you!

Swift Weekly is looking for sponsors. If your company or someone you know would like to sponsor this community-driven project, reach out! Thank you!

WWDC21 is over and it was a crazy week - full of new stuff, great sessions and things to learn during the summer. What were your favorite sessions?

If you have thoughts on how to make next year’s WWDC even better, you can express them here.

I loved all the sessions about Swift concurrency and the new SwiftUI stuff, but I haven’t watched them all. Don’t worry if you haven’t seen everything. We’ll have time to consume and learn all this new stuff. Take it easy and enjoy!

We are looking for sponsors for Swift Weekly. You can find all the information about sponsorship here.

We have a jam-packed issue this time, so let’s get to it!

WWDC21 is just a couple of days away! Everyone is super excited, and there will be many community events throughout the week and later this month. Don’t worry if you can’t follow everything. We have plenty of time afterwards! The most important thing is to enjoy this moment and follow along at your own pace!

This month we celebrate Pride Month, and with it the new Pride in Swift community group, which is now open.

I want to end this introduction by congratulating Apple’s WWDC21 Swift Student Challenge winners. This year the intake includes three women, Damilola Awofisayo, Gianna Yan, and Abinaya Dinesh, whose code will definitely change our world!

Now let’s get to the news and enjoy WWDC21. Thanks!

WWDC21 is just around the corner, and I believe we will have many significant updates then.

My favourite news piece in the last two weeks is the Swift Mentorship Program announcement. Mentoring and discovering how I can help others grow in their careers is very demanding but rewarding. I wish I had someone who could help me early in my career. So I encourage you to use this opportunity to get involved. Thank you to everyone who is making this possible.

Now let’s check out what’s happened in the last two weeks!

Let’s start with the most important news: Swift 5.4 has been released alongside Xcode 12.5. It has some notable new features and additions like result builders, multiple variadic parameters, and more.

WWDC is just one month away! Who knows, maybe this is the reason why so many Swift Evolution proposals are in review or have been accepted?

For the last couple of weeks I have been pretty swamped with work, and I’m glad that I’m not alone on this project. If you want to get involved, or your company wants to sponsor, it would be very much appreciated. Thank you, everyone!

I want to thank Jeroen for helping out with last week’s issue. He did a great job spicing up the usual flow. How did you like it? Let us know.

We finally have the Xcode 12.5 RC, and it has some notable Swift language fixes and improvements.

In the last two weeks it seems like the Swift core team have woken up after a winter slumber. Dozens of proposals are now in review and many have been returned.

Now let’s go to the news!

Big announcement this week: WWDC21 will happen from June 7 to 11. It will be online only, so everyone in our community can join in on the fun.

Kristaps asked me to take care of the newsletter this week. So hi, my name is Jeroen and I recently got involved with Swift Weekly Brief by running some infrastructure. Writing for you all is a bit of a leap for me, so let us know what you think!

Just like in issue 181 I will start by mentioning the wonderful work being done to build a more inclusive Swift developer ecosystem: Diversity in Swift.

As always Swift Evolution is moving fast. Quite a few interesting proposals have been accepted, and a number of interesting pitches have been proposed. On top of that, we’ve decided to add a community section below, to highlight a few members whose work we think you will like.

Thank you so much for reading, and enjoy issue 182.

We have a fantastic new domain: swiftweeklybrief.com. 🎉

I would like to personally thank Jeroen Leenarts for his tremendous help with the new email marketing platform.

This month is also an opportunity to celebrate the amazing women in our community. Holly Borla, a lead member of the Diversity in Swift work group, highlights many prominent contributers on the Swift.org blog. If you’d like to get involved, please message @diversity-work-group on the Swift Forums.

We’re glad to say that the Actors proposal is now under review. Some vast improvements are coming to Swift later this year!

There are so many great pitches for this year’s Google Summer of Code for the Swift language. Some of these pitches will be implemented by university students over the summer.

Thank you, everyone, for reading and supporting this project!

Another two weeks have passed in the blink of an eye. I’ve been busy launching my new project into the wild, listening to critical feedback from early users, and doing my best to improve it.

Jeroen Leenarts and I teamed up to improve the mailing list platform we’re using to send out this newsletter, and hopefully to cut costs. This week is the first real test. If this email finds your mailbox, then we know it’s working. :)

I want to thank all the supporters, sponsors and everyone in the Swift community who help make this project happen. If you have any ideas about things to change, improve upon, or help support this newsletter financially, please let me know.

Without further ado, we have some great news this time!

This month we are celebrating Black History Month, which makes this a good time to recognize those Swift community members who have had a tremendous impact on all of us. I want to thank them and everyone else who enriches and moves our community forward.

It’s sad to see that Swift for TensorFlow has been archived. On a positive note, the project shows us that Swift can be used for advanced experiments in machine learning.

Lately, I have been enjoying discussions on Clubhouse, the drop-in audio chat app. There is already a large Swift community putting on events like Ladies Who Code, daily get-togethers, interview coaching, even teaching Swift — thanks to Stephanie Chiu, Ting Becker, Vivian Phung, Paul Hudson, and Majid Jabrayilov for setting up some of these rooms.

We still have several sponsorship slots available. Please reach out to me through email, or say hello on Twitter.

Thank you. Now it’s time for the news!

The last two weeks passed by so quickly! I’ve been busy with a new project, launching this week, and I’ve been exploring SwiftUI 2 new features like LazyVStack, LazyHGrid, @StateObject and more. So far, I love it a lot.

In the interim, Apple released Xcode 12.5 Beta, which includes many important additions and fixes for the Swift language. We still need to wait a little longer for async/await, but it’s getting closer.

As always, thank you for supporting this newsletter. We are looking for all kinds of assistance - financial, putting together new issues, or contributing to improve the site. If there’s something you think you can do, we’d love to hear from you.

Now, straight to the news!

The last two weeks have passed very quickly. I volunteered to help my country plan and develop a system for distributing Covid-19 vaccines to those most in need. I hope everything runs as smoothly as it can.

I want to say thank you to the people and companies that have reached out about sponsorship. Thank you for that! It makes a big difference, and we still have free spots to support this newsletter and help us cover the running costs.

Lately, we have seen a rapid increase in new proposals from the community. It’s been great to see new folks joining and expressing their ideas. That means there’ll be more for us to cover, so let’s get on with the news.

We are back from the holiday break. Whether you celebrate or not, I hope you took some time off to relax after this crazy 2020. We’re now in 2021, and I believe this year we will slowly move back to a more normal life. I hope we can meet in smaller meetups at the end of the year and start to safely travel again.

We have significant updates from async/await field. A proposal adding this functionality has been accepted! There is a great video by Vincent Pradeilles demonstrating how we can experiment with it already using the Swift development snapshot. Check it out.

I want to end this issue by calling for sponsors. Swift Weekly is a great place to promote your solution or company and target the Swift language professional audience. You’d also be supporting a community-backed project. This email and website would not be possible without our sponsors. We need to cover running costs and have some exciting plans to bring this project to the next level. Financial support would go a long way towards achieving these goals.

Before heading into the holiday period, we have some great news about async/await. The proposal adding this functionality is under review. It’s a good opportunity to express your opinion.

We have some news from the Swift Server Workgroup. Three new people have joined to help support future efforts.

We end this year with a notable and very welcome initiative - Diversity in Swift. The Diversity in Swift workgroup will use the Community Showcase to brainstorm ideas and topics for these community-focused blog posts. The first post curates helpful resources for accessibility and inclusion in Swift, all made by awesome developers from our community.

This brief is the last issue of the year. We are taking a small festive break and will be back in early January.

Evoking the spirit of philanthropy, if you’d like to sponsor the Weekly Brief when we return, please get in touch.

Wishing you the happiest of holidays and a fantastic New Year! 🍷

On this day, exactly five years ago, Apple open-sourced the Swift programming language! Imagine how fast this language has moved, and what the next five years will bring.

We have some excellent news for server-side Swift development. Starting with the introduction of SwiftNIO SSH and an early version of Docker Desktop running on Apple Silicon, we can add Mac instances for EC2 which are now available from Amazon Web Services. I think this will open even more doors for Swift, and let developers build great products in even more places!