More concurrency changes

Paul Hudson      @twostraws

Swift 5.5 added a lot of features around concurrency, and 5.6 continues the process of refining those features to make them safer and more consistent, while also working towards bigger, breaking changes coming in Swift 6.

The biggest change is SE-0337, which aims to provide a roadmap towards full, strict concurrency checking for our code. This is designed to be incremental: you can import whole modules using @preconcurrency to tell Swift the module was created without modern concurrency in mind; or you can mark individual classes, structs, properties, methods and more as @preconcurrency to be more selective.

In the short term this makes it significantly easier to migrate larger projects to modern concurrency.

Another area that’s changing is the use of actors, because as a result of SE-0327 Swift 5.6 now issues a warning if you attempt to instantiate a @MainActor property using @StateObject like this:

import SwiftUI

@MainActor class Settings: ObservableObject { }

struct OldContentView: View {
    @StateObject private var settings = Settings()

    var body: some View {
        Text("Hello, world!")
    }
}

This warning will be upgraded to an error in Swift 6, so you should be prepared to move away from this code and use this instead:

struct NewContentView: View {
    @StateObject private var settings: Settings

    init() {
        _settings = StateObject(wrappedValue: Settings())
    }

    var body: some View {
        Text("Hello, world!")
    }
}

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Other changes in Swift 5.6…

• Introduce existential any
• Type placeholders
• Allow coding of non String/Int keyed Dictionary into a KeyedContainer
• Unavailability condition
• Plugins for Swift Package Manager

Download all Swift 5.6 changes as a playground Link to Swift 5.6 changes

Browse changes in all Swift versions