[swift-evolution] Winding down the Swift 3 release

Rod Brown rodney.brown6 at icloud.com
Tue May 17 08:38:11 CDT 2016


While on the face of it, you are correct, the goals have changed dramatically, I think you are being unfair.

Swift 3 initial scope was determined prior to the input of the Swift Evolution community, just as it was being Open Sourced. As we have explored the language in many discussions, it has been clear there are other areas of the language that needed clean and polish before a stable ABI can be established.

It appears that this work is more involved than the Swift Team initially envisioned. The fact they are open to changing timelines and ensuring we get fundamentals of the language sorted is a testament to their commitment to the quality of Swift as a whole.

Looking at Swift 3 as compared to Swift 2, there are massive changes in the pipeline that both break source and change the language fundamentally. I think it's far too much to ask that they get this work done rushed, and also pile on ABI compatibility goals at the last minute. Do we really want to rush this and get it wrong?

I applaud the team in making a tough decision that these changes should come before we start working on the ABI.

- Rod

> On 17 May 2016, at 10:35 PM, Jeremy Pereira via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
> 
> 
>> On 16 May 2016, at 18:38, Goffredo Marocchi via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
>> 
>> Quite sad we could not get into ABI stability for Swift 3... but are we talking Swift 3.1 or 4.0?
> 
> 
> Disappointing is my first thought, in fact worrying. Two years after the language was announced, the ABI is still not stable.
> 
> Of the original Swift 3 goals, it looks like many will not be met. There were seven goals and only two are still in the Readme file[1]. On the assumption that the other five were all dropped because they will not be achieved in Swift 3, this looks like failure.
> 
> I’ve been following the evolution list on and off since it started and it hasn’t felt like failure. In fact, it felt like important progress has been made and the language will be hugely better for it, but I do hope that the development team does take the opportunity to review the release in light of the original goals to see if there are any opportunities to improve the development process for the next release.
> 
> 
> [1] https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution/blob/d6e62467b03435bdc4b3bd473c3dcffb9fdd6a71/README.md compared to https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution/blob/f11d2e970521f5df0f7510f89ee9c7decb3fa394/README.md
> 
> 
> 
>> 
>> Sent from my iPhone
> 
> _______________________________________________
> swift-evolution mailing list
> swift-evolution at swift.org
> https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution


More information about the swift-evolution mailing list