Naming issues is without doubt one of the two exhausting issues in laptop science, and Swift 6 has a “naming issues” drawback in the intervening time.
We’ve been repeatedly instructed that Swift 6 will embrace some modifications that break supply compatibility with Swift 5.x. That makes good sense, after all. That’s what a significant semantic model needs to be used for. Thus far so good. 👍
However what I mentioned there doesn’t give the entire image, and that’s the place the naming drawback is available in. There’s the Swift 6 compiler, after which there’s “Swift 6 language mode”, and you may undertake the Swift 6 compiler with out adopting the language mode. All of the strict concurrency checks and information race security options are within the language mode, and that brings the breaking modifications.
You can begin utilizing the Swift 6 compiler now (or extra possible when it makes it to a beta/launch model of Xcode) after which opt-in to the language mode while you really feel like tackling the breaking modifications. There’s no imminent deadline respiration down your neck.
None of that is new information. The language mode has been talked about for a very long time, however the distinction is refined and it handed me by till not too long ago, and you could be in the identical state of affairs.
A a lot better particular person to speak about this could be Holly Borla, supervisor of the Swift Compiler Workforce, and it simply so occurs we not too long ago had her as a visitor on the Swift Bundle Indexing podcast. It was a pleasure to speak to Holly, and we lined this concern in depth as considered one of a number of Swift 6 subjects.
For those who don’t already subscribe to the podcast give this episode a pay attention and take into account hitting that subscribe or observe button in your podcast participant. We speak about Swift (together with server-side), the event of the Swift Bundle Index undertaking, and bundle ecosystem subjects. We additionally spotlight a number of community-written packages in each episode. Give it a strive!
Dave Verwer 
