Welcome to issue #25!

Welcome to issue #24! As noted last week, the first Swift 3 preview branch was cut and now there’s a Swift 3.0 Preview 1 milestone on GitHub tracking pull requests to be included. Currently there are 60 closed and 4 open.

Swift is about to hit another important milestone — 100 proposals. As of this writing there have been 99 Swift evolution proposals merged into the repository, many of them from the community. Swift has only been open source for about 6 months, so that’s over 16 proposals per month — nearly one proposal every other day! I’m pretty sure coordinating, reviewing, and writing swift-evolution announcement emails is Chris Lattner’s new “nights and weekends” passion. 😉

Thus, last week’s announcement about the goals of Swift 3 really should not have been a surprise. I think Dave Verwer said it best, “It’s likely that this volume of high quality community input came as a surprise to the Swift team. Certainly, if it was still closed source, the scope and features of Swift 3 would have been different.”

In other news, Apple released new betas for iOS, tvOS, and OS X.

Welcome to issue 23! This week Apple released iOS 9.3.2 and OS X 10.11.5. We’re only one month away from WWDC, and Realm just announced that they will be hosting another WWDC Swift Panel this year, if you’ll be here for the conference you should RSVP! It would be great to see you there. 😄

Chris Lattner also announced updates on the goals and status of Swift 3. See the details below in the Mailing lists section.

This week Ted Kremenek wrote an official blog post on the Swift 3.0 release process. It’s going to be an exciting release and it’s still scheduled to ship later this year. Unfortunately, it won’t be ready by WWDC 2016, but I’m sure we’ll have a decent beta by then.

The main Swift repository also surpassed 30,000 stars this week! That’s nearly double the amount of the next most popular programming language developed on GitHub. ⭐️⭐️⭐️ Here’s to an amazing community — Swift certainly is more than a programming language. 😊

Welcome to issue #21! There hasn’t been much news this week other than Xcode 7.3.1 was released, so let’s get on to the weekly brief. It was another huge week for proposals and it feels like the core team is moving really fast ahead of WWDC 2016. 💪

Were any of you lucky enough to get a ticket to WWDC 2016?! I’m excited to share that I’ll be attending this year. If you got a ticket too, I’ll see you there! However, if you won’t be at WWDC, don’t worry. There are plenty of other great conferences. 😄 Swift Summit has announced its 2016 conference in San Francisco. It will be held this year on November 7 and 8, and yours truly will be speaking. 🤓 Also, the LLVM Developers’ Meeting will be held on November 3 and 4 in San Jose, CA.

As you must know by now, WWDC 2016 has been announced! What’s most surprising and exciting to me is the emphasis on Swift — it’s all over the WWDC pages on Apple’s site. I certainly did not expect this strong of a focus on Swift. Usually there are teasers about the upcoming OS and hardware releases. Of course, it’s no surprise that Swift 3.0 is coming so it makes me wonder, what else is planned for Swift that we don’t know about?

In other news, the Xcode 7.3.1 GM seed was released. It includes a bunch of bug fixes and Swift 2.2.1. However, the release notes didn’t specify the Swift version and the version number did not get bumped in Xcode. But don’t worry, the fixes are in there. 😄

If you have not heard it already, the big news this week is that the port to Android pull request from Brian Gesiak and Zhuowei Zhang has finally merged after a month and a half of review and discussion. 🎉 👏 🙌 No matter what, this was going to be significant addition to Swift. However, as Dave Verwer noted in iOS Dev Weekly last week, it seems even more important given the recent rumors that Google may be considering Swift for Android.

As mentioned last week, the Swift 2.2.x milestone is still open and remains unchanged — all 33 issues closed. The Swift 2.2 branch is currently 363 commits ahead of master, but the most recent activity was 8 days ago. Maybe we’ll see an official release soon?

Welcome to issue #17! After all this time, the core team is still just as encouraging to contributors as it was on day one. It’s really cool to see this. 😎 Meanwhile, the Swift 2.2.x milestone accumulated more issues, and as of this writing all 33 issues are closed. Maybe we’ll see a patch release for 2.2 soon? Also, yesterday Apple released new betas for iOS 9.3.2, tvOS 9.2.1, watchOS 2.2.1, and OS X 10.11.5 — notably absent is Xcode.

Welcome to issue #16! Last week’s exciting news on the release of Swift 2.2 has been followed up by an official blog post detailing the new features. Check it out if you haven’t already.

Also of interest is that Apple started a new beta program for Safari, Safari Technology Preview. This doesn’t have much to do with Swift, but to me it seems like perhaps Swift’s openness is starting to influence more teams within Apple. Maybe? The recent CareKit announcement also supports this theory. Anyway, I’m still hoping for an open source Xcode. 😁

Swift 2.2 has been released! It includes contributions from 212 non-Apple contributors and 7 Swift evolution proposals. Be sure to read Ted Kremenek’s announcement on the mailing list for more details. The final version of Xcode 7.3 was also released, which includes Swift 2.2 and other improvements. Hopefully you were able to upgrade successfully. 😅

Regarding new features, I agree with Ayaka that having non-stringly-typed Objective-C selectors is so great. And of course, there were a number of interesting announcements at Apple’s special event on Monday. This was my favorite new product. 😄

Lastly, in case you missed it, there’s now an official mailing list for Swift Weekly Brief! Subscribe now. 💌

Welcome to issue #14 of the weekly brief! Just like Dave Verwer, I’ve been anticipating the final release of Xcode 7.3 — as well as iOS 9.3, OS X 10.11.4, and watchOS 2.2. Xcode 7.3 will include the final version of Swift 2.2. Perhaps the core team will “loop us in” next Monday. 😉

Welcome to issue #13 of the weekly brief! This week Apple released beta 6 of iOS 9.3, watchOS 2.2, and OS X 10.11.4, with no new beta for Xcode 7.3 — the final release should be getting close!

Welcome to issue #12 of the weekly brief! More huge news this week as the Core Team is now expanding commit access to non-Apple contributors! Congratulations to the following contributors for getting commit access! 🎉 😎 👏

• Brian Gesiak
• Greg Titus
• Daniel Duan
• Kevin Ballard
• Kostiantyn Koval

If I missed anyone, please submit a pull request to update the list! 😄 This week also brought us Xcode 7.3 beta 5. We should be getting close to the final release.

Welcome to issue #11 of the weekly brief! There was big news this week with IBM’s announcement on bringing Swift to the cloud with a new open web framework called Kitura and the IBM Swift Package Catalog. The test framework for Kitura server is even using corelibs-xctest. 😎 Apple’s partnership with IBM is definitely starting to benefit the community! 🎉

Welcome to issue #10 of the weekly brief! This week Eddy Cue and Craig Federighi appeared on The Talk Show with John Gruber. There wasn’t much talk about Swift, but they did discuss plenty of interesting things. I highly recommend listening, especially if you are an iOS developer! 📱

Welcome to Issue #9 of the weekly brief! Because issues are zero-indexed, this means we’ve reached our 10th issue milestone. 🎉 Thanks for reading each week! 😄 Things seem to have slightly slowed down this week. Even the Xcode 7.3 beta 3 release notes were mostly uneventful. It feels like we’re getting closer to the final Xcode 7.3 and Swift 2.2 releases.

This week an official blog post on Swift.org announced the new continuous integration setup that I mentioned last week. There is now a dedicated page on the main site and you can check the status here. It seems to be nicely integrated with GitHub, and mostly works. 😄

This week brought us Xcode 7.3 beta2 — the first official Xcode release that bundles Swift 2.2 and includes contributions from the Swift.org open source community! I never thought I would see release notes like this. It really is incredible to see community-driven changes in the What’s New sections with links to GitHub. Clearly, the next big step for Apple should be open sourcing Xcode. 😉

It has been over a month since the initial Swift open source announcement and I still keep discovering new things. I’m still just as excited to watch Swift grow and evolve. Welcome to issue #6 of the weekly brief!

As you can see, the weekly brief has a new home! It feels much nicer to have a dedicated site rather than my personal blog. I’m sure there are still some bugs lurking around, so if you find any or have suggestions for improvements to the site, please open an issue on GitHub!

Now that the holidays are over, things have started to pick up again on Swift.org. If you are following any of the repos on GitHub, you have probably noticed. I’m not sure how I missed this before, but this week I just discovered SwiftExperimental.swift. For now, it defines a bunch of custom unicode operators for Set. It’s really cool. I would love to see more APIs like this in the standard library. Anyway, here’s the weekly brief!

As expected with the holiday season, things are slowing down for a bit on Swift.org. I have been traveling for the holidays as well, so this issue will be shorter than usual. If you haven’t already, be sure you take some time away from coding to enjoy the holidays and avoid burnout. 😄 Now, the weekly brief!

The Swift.org community is finishing up its second full week of open source development. If you were hoping for a quiet week, you will definitely be disappointed. There is still a ton of activity with no signs of slowing down. The Swift team continues to work openly and to be encouraging to contributors. This week brought more crash fixes and more Swift Evolution proposals. Let’s get to it — the weekly brief!

It looks many developers in the community enjoyed my previous post detailing my thoughts and observations on the activity around the Swift open source project. So, I’m going to try to do this weekly — every Thursday, since the open source announcement was on a Thursday. Each week I’ll provide a high-level summary of what’s been happening, updates on interesting statistics, and links to interesting content. If you have any suggestions, please let me know! And now, the weekly brief!