[swift-evolution] Swift 3 vs "additive" proposals

[Chris Lattner]

Hi Everyone,

As I mentioned before, the Swift 3 release is winding down.  There is still time left to make changes, but it is very short.  As such, we - as a community - need to stay focused on the goals for this release, principally the goal to get to source stability.  It is very important for users of Swift that Swift 3 and the Swift 4 compiler be as compatible as possible.  This is important for the continued growth of Swift into new places, like new platforms (which don’t get the benefit of Xcode migration) and Swift Playgrounds.

As such, “additive" proposals will need very strong rationale explaining why they are critical for the Swift 3 release, and we won’t be merging these proposals into the swift-evolution repository unless they have that.  We should stay focused on proposals that perfect the features we have, rather than adding new ones.

Similarly, general discussions on this mailing list about blue sky additions to the language are distracting from our important goals, and the core team generally isn’t paying attention to these anyway.  I would really appreciate it if we could stay focused on what is important, until the time is right to look beyond Swift 3.  This time is in August (which will be here way too soon :-), at which point we can look to the future.  I outlined this here earlier:

https://lists.swift.org/pipermail/swift-evolution/Week-of-Mon-20160516/017701.html

Sorry to be a “downer”, but Swift 3 really is a very important release for the Swift developer community as a whole.

-Chris