So the lovely Greg took over last issue as I was at a conference, try! Swift NYC. I’ve had an amazing time at the conference (and New York) where I gave a talk about the history of Swift. A video of that talk will be posted in the future.

A big thank you goes out to the organizers, the volunteers and all of those who I got to meet at the conference!

We are also working on bringing back subscriptions via email. To cover the associated costs, we are looking for sponsors again.

We’re sharing more details soon. If you or your company are interested in sponsoring the newsletter, please send me a direct message on Twitter.

That being said, and without further ado, here is an update on everything Swift from the past two weeks.

Bikeshedding, literals, thinking raw strings;
Swift on the server is earning its wings.

Numbers are multiples, even or odd;
Pull requests benchmarking faster, no fraud.

September announcements are here once again;
New phones and devices, and soon Xcode 10.

September is here, and we’re closing out the Summer of Swift. We’ve almost made it through the beta period and now iOS 12, macOS Mojave, Xcode 10, and Swift 4.2 are upon us.

There’s been a flurry of activity on Swift Evolution and around the community; let’s get started with all the latest!

September is approaching swiftly, which means that we’ll be seeing new iPhones and all the new software before we know it.

And although that won’t yet bring Swift 5, we will get Swift 4.2 that comes with some awesome improvements as well, plus we’ll still have Swift 5 to look forward to!

A calm week during these warm two summer weeks. Nevertheless, here is a quick update on what has happened these weeks.

Not only did the Swift repository pass 18,000 pull requests (after the internal repository had 18,000 SVN revisions after four years), it also celebrated its 8th birthday! Impressive numbers, and may many more follow.

Apart from that, I hope many of you are enjoying an awesome summer!

Welcome to the 113th issue of Swift Weekly Brief! This week was more calm, no news explosions. The repositories and Swift.org discussions had their usual activity.

I am back! I had the most wonderful time at WWDC, learning a lot of and meeting awesome people. I want to specifically thank all those that have shown their gratitude for the weekly brief, it’s much appreciated!

Without further ado, here’s this week’s news on the Swift.org open source projects.

Hi there SwiftWeekly readers! The last two weeks were full of exciting news with WWDC, interesting discussions on the Swift Unwrapped podcast and there’s plenty of new starter tasks for you, especially for SPM. Enjoy!

With WWDC around the corner (it starts in four days!), it is not that big of a surprise that these last two weeks have been pretty quiet when it comes to Swift.

Also, come and say hi at WWDC!

I’m starting to get more excited about WWDC by the day right now. Looking forward to meeting people and learning about all new technologies and APIs that we will be seeing. It feels so long ago since last year’s WWDC!

Also, if you’re there too, feel free to say hi! 👋

That being said, here is another two weeks of interesting Open Source Swift news, including another few awesome proposals (I am not complaining, but what happened with that March 1 “deadline”?) and interesting announcements.

Enjoy!

Another two weeks have passed since the last issue, and its now May. How time flies! WWDC is creeping up, while the Swift team is still hard at work on Swift 4.2 and Swift 5.

Over the last two weeks we have seen a lot of proposals that have been discussed (and accepted), and it is likely we will see many of these proposals being released in either Swift 4.2 or Swift 5.

Lo! The forum posts and pitches fly on by
What rants and revelations there await?
Swift 5 remains a glimmer in the sky
As compactMap arrives to disorientate.

New Xcode versions, filled with all-new fix-its
And random numbers, ascribing golden tickets.

There’s been plenty of news to make developers experience the full range of emotions: Xcode 9.3 with Swift 4.1 made it out of the gate, the WWDC ticket lottery smiled on some and caused gnashing of teeth in others.

Meanwhile, Swift 4.2 and beyond await us. As a reminder, the final merge into the Swift 4.2 branch before the soak period is coming up in two weeks, on April 20.

What’s new in the world of Swift? Read on!

Hello again! 👋 This week Apple announced the WWDC 2018 which will be held from June 4-8 in San Jose, CA. Doug Gregor and Ben Cohen discussed some insights on the Swift 4.1 release on Swift Unwrapped.

A lot has happened in the past two weeks. Apple introduced a new open source framework, a new Xcode beta was released (with improved compile-times!) and Swift 4.2 was announced. And of course, Swift 5 has seen another two weeks of progress.

So, without further ado…

The last two weeks have brought us some exciting progress on Swift 5 and Xcode 9.3 (which brings us Swift 4.1). Regarding Xcode, we’re now on beta 3.

We can also expected some news on WWDC soon - last year, Apple announced WWDC on February 16th.

That being said, I don’t want to distract you from all the topics discussed in the newsletter. Thanks for reading!

Welcome to issue #102!

Hi! 👋

We’re back. After a short hiatus, we are continuing Swift Weekly Brief every other week. 🎉 As Jesse mentioned, he will be taking a break from writing the newsletter. I will be taking over the curation of the newsletter for now, with the help of some awesome contributors and writers.

There is more great news: the Swift Forums are now live! They offer a more visual, searchable and navigatable way of browsing through the previous mailing lists. This will hopefully make the barrier for chiming in on everything Swift.org lower. Go have a look - and a huge congratulations to the team at Apple for realising this.

Welcome to issue #100! 🎉As you’ve probably heard by now, this will be the final issue of the newsletter. I encourage you to read my entire blog post announcement, but here’s the TL;DR: it’s time for me to focus on other projects and priorities, and if possible, transition the newsletter to a new owner. Luckily, the project is extremely healthy and could easily be taken over by an eager and motivated member of the community. If you are interested, please get in touch!

This newsletter started out as an accident. It began on my personal blog before I decided to create this site and start the mailing list. Two years later, here we are. It’s been a pleasure to deliver an issue to your inbox each week. The good news is that I’ll still be bringing you Swift news regularly — in podcast form with the one and only JP Simard. If you haven’t subscribed, you should do it now. 😄 I’ll also continue to write about Swift on my blog. Of course, there are many other fantastic blogs to follow in the Swift community, which I’ve linked to often — so there will be no shortage of content for sure! My hope is that the new Swift forums, which should be rolled out soon, will help make following Swift evolution and other Swift.org news easier without this newsletter.

Alright — let’s get on with our last issue!

Welcome to issue #99! 🎈 Last week we discussed the move away from the mailing lists to official Swift forums, which were intended to be fully rolled out by now. Unfortunately, the rollout has been delayed until early next year due to feedback from users and the holiday season. Almost there! In other news, two exciting proposals were introduced this week that have significant implications for library authors, the Swift ABI, and potential performance improvements. Swift 5 is starting to look like a very exciting release!

All the way back in Issue #55 we covered discussions on the swift-evolution mailing list about possibly moving to a “modern” form-based solution for discussion and leaving the mailing lists behind. This week, about a year later, the transition to Discourse.org is starting today! This means the mailing lists will be disabled tonight (US Pacific time) with the transition completing by Monday (Dec 18).

I think most are excited about the move. Given the volume of discussions and the lack of adequate search for the mailing lists, I think this will be a great improvement for the Swift community — not to mention more approachable. If you’ve been avoiding swift-evolution because you aren’t a fan of email (who isn’t?!), then this might be your chance to get more involved. You’ll be able to sign up via email or with your GitHub account.

Swift officially turned two years old this week, which means this newsletter is also two years old! It’s hard to believe. We’ve certainly come a long way, but there’s plenty of work to be done. Here’s to another great year of Swift!

I’ve returned! 😊 Welcome back to the weekly. We skipped last week and I haven’t written the last few issues, but luckily we have some amazing contributors to help bring this to your inbox each week. Big thanks to Bas, Brian, and Roman. I was traveling and speaking at iOS Conf Singapore and then the very first try! Swift India — both of which were great!

This week, we saw a progress on conditional conformances, a few new proposals, and discussions on Swift interop with Python.

“The sky is falling! The sky is falling, and Google is forking Swift!”

Fear not, dear reader, Google doesn’t appear to be “forking” the Swift project – no matter what the blowhards on some venture capitalist’s forum board tell you. Instead, Google employees will simply be using google/swift as a staging area for their pull requests to the main apple/swift project. In fact, this week we already saw some incredible contributions from Google engineers, including support for Fuchsia OS!

So while the internet tries to get a rise out of you, just keep reading Swift Weekly Brief to learn what’s really going on in Swift – I promise you it’ll be less melodramatic than what’s “trending” on Twitter. 😏

This week in Swift development: the Swift team created several fun new starter tasks, Doug Gregor fixed a nasty bug in Objective-C interop, and the mailing lists were abuzz with several exciting Swift Evolution proposals. Adjust your Apple Watches – it’s “Swift Weekly Brief O’Clock”!