What's new in Swift?
Here you can find detailed descriptions of all the major Swift changes from launch through to now, including example code and downloadable playgrounds you can run in Xcode.
Changes in Swift 5.8
- Lift all limitations on variables in result builders
- Function back deployment
- Allow implicit self for weak self captures, after self is unwrapped
- Concise magic file names
- Opening existential arguments to optional parameters
- Collection downcasts in cast patterns are now supported
Download Swift 5.8 playground Link to Swift 5.8 changes
Changes in Swift 5.7
- if let shorthand for unwrapping optionals
- Multi-statement closure type inference
- Clock, Instant, and Duration
- Regular expressions
- Type inference from default expressions
- Concurrency in top-level code
- Opaque parameter declarations
- Structural opaque result types
- Unlock existentials for all protocols
- Lightweight same-type requirements for primary associated types
- Constrained existential types
- Distributed actor isolation
- buildPartialBlock for result builders
- Implicitly opened existentials
- Unavailable from async attribute
Download Swift 5.7 playground Link to Swift 5.7 changes
Changes in Swift 5.6
- Introduce existential any
- Type placeholders
- Allow coding of non String/Int keyed Dictionary into a KeyedContainer
- Unavailability condition
- More concurrency changes
- Plugins for Swift Package Manager
Download Swift 5.6 playground Link to Swift 5.6 changes
Changes in Swift 5.5
- Async await
- Async sequences
- Effectful read-only properties
- Structured concurrency
- async let bindings
- Continuations for interfacing async tasks with synchronous code
- Actors
- Global actors
- Sendable and @Sendable closures
- if for postfix member expressions
- Interchangeable use of CGFloat and Double types
- Codable synthesis for enums with associated values
- lazy now works in local contexts
- Extending property wrappers to function and closure parameters
- Extending static member lookup in generic contexts
Download Swift 5.5 playground Link to Swift 5.5 changes
Changes in Swift 5.4
- Improved implicit member syntax
- Multiple variadic parameters in functions
- Local functions now support overloading
- Creating variables that call a function of the same name
- Result builders
- Property wrappers are now supported for local variables
- Packages can now declare executable targets
Download Swift 5.4 playground Link to Swift 5.4 changes
Changes in Swift 5.3
- Multi-pattern catch clauses
- Multiple trailing closures
- Synthesized Comparable conformance for enums
- self is no longer required in many places
- Type-based program entry points
- where clauses on contextually generic declarations
- Enum cases as protocol witnesses
- Refined didSet semantics
- A new Float16 type
- Swift Package Manager gains binary dependencies, resources, and more
Download Swift 5.3 playground Link to Swift 5.3 changes
Changes in Swift 5.2
- Key path expressions as functions
- Callable values of user-defined nominal types
- Subscripts can now declare default arguments
- Lazy filtering order is now reversed
- New and improved diagnostics
Download Swift 5.2 playground Link to Swift 5.2 changes
Changes in Swift 5.1
- Improvements to synthesized memberwise initializers
- Implicit returns from single-expression functions
- Universal Self
- Opaque return types
- Static and class subscripts
- Warnings for ambiguous none cases
- Matching optional enums against non-optionals
- Ordered collection diffing
- Creating uninitialized arrays
Download Swift 5.1 playground Link to Swift 5.1 changes
Changes in Swift 5.0
- Raw strings
- A standard Result type
- Customizing string interpolation
- Dynamically callable types
- Handling future enum cases
- Flattening nested optionals resulting from try?
- Checking for integer multiples
- Transforming and unwrapping dictionary values with compactMapValues()
Download Swift 5.0 playground Link to Swift 5.0 changes
Changes in Swift 4.2
- Derived collections of enum cases
- Warning and error diagnostic directives
- Dynamic member look up
- Enhanced conditional conformances
- Random number generation and shuffling
- Simpler, more secure hashing
- Checking sequence elements match a condition
- In-place collection element removal
- Boolean toggling
Download Swift 4.2 playground Link to Swift 4.2 changes
Changes in Swift 4.1
- Synthesized Equatable and Hashable
- Key decoding strategies for Codable
- Conditional conformances
- Recursive constraints on associated types
- Build configuration import testing
- Target environment testing
- flatMap is now (partly) compactMap()
Download Swift 4.1 playground Link to Swift 4.1 changes
Changes in Swift 4.0
- Encoding and decoding data using Codable
- Multi-line string literals
- Improved keypaths for key-value coding
- Improved dictionary functionality
- Strings are collections again
- One-sided ranges
Download Swift 4.0 playground Link to Swift 4.0 changes
Changes in Swift 3.1
- Concrete constrained extensions
- Generics with nested types
- Sequences get prefix(while:) and drop(while:) methods
Download Swift 3.1 playground Link to Swift 3.1 changes
Changes in Swift 3.0
- All function parameters have labels unless you request otherwise
- Omit needless words
- UpperCamelCase has been replaced with lowerCamelCase for enums and properties
- Swifty importing of C functions
- Verbs and nouns
Download Swift 3.0 playground Link to Swift 3.0 changes
Changes in Swift 2.2
- ++ and -- are deprecated
- Traditional C-style for loops are deprecated
- Comparing tuples
- Tuple splat syntax is deprecated
- More keywords can be used as argument labels
- Variable parameters have been deprecated
- Renamed debug identifiers: line, function, file
- Stringified selectors are deprecated
- Compile-time Swift version checking
Download Swift 2.2 playground Link to Swift 2.2 changes
Changes in Swift 2.1
Download Swift 2.1 playground Link to Swift 2.1 changes
Changes in Swift 2.0
- Throwing errors
- Use the guard keyword for early returns
- Measure strings using their character count
- Use the defer keyword to delay work until your scope exits
- Mutability warnings
- Checking API availability
Download Swift 2.0 playground Link to Swift 2.0 changes
Changes in Swift 1.2
- The zip() function joins two sequences
- The flatMap() method transforms optionals and arrays
- Closures can now be marked @noescape
- Classes can now have static methods and properties
- Constants no longer require immediate initialization
- A new Set data structure
- Implicit bridging has been reduced
- Multiple if let bindings
- Typecasting now includes as!
Download Swift 1.2 playground Link to Swift 1.2 changes
