[swift-evolution] Seriously! Freeze Swift For Two Years After Release 3.0 !

[Erica Sadun]

> On Jul 7, 2016, at 8:46 AM, Karl via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
> It’s nice that you like Swift 3.0 so much, but it still has holes - there are plans in the generics manifesto for instance which are basically just limited by implementation. We don’t have a stable ABI. Reflection is still fairly rudimentary.
> 
> I don’t think the changes from Swift 2.2 -> Swift 3.0 are that dramatic, but overall I feel they have made the language much better. The new indexing model, for instance, is a significant improvement; it’s now much easier to write custom collections. I was initially opposed to moving the “where” clause for generics outside of the angle brackets, but I’ve come around and I’m really looking forward to it, now. I’m even glad we got rid of C-style ‘for’ loops - it has helped me write safer, more readable code. There have been some really great performance improvements and I’m seeing more and more really big ones in the Github PR list every day (it’s really fascinating, I do love seeing how the language is getting improved piece-by-piece, in parallel, by so many people - I like to just flick through it sometimes and click on every title I don’t understand, sometimes you discover really cool things).

I don't want to freeze Swift 3.0 either.

I'd much prefer to push out Swift 3.0 to grant it time to mature and perfect (and get those generics right, add some great features, etc) than to freeze Swift 3.0 under the currently announced timeline. Swift 2.2/2.3 is pretty great. 

The obvious problem with doing this is that it encourages the development of a wider codebase that *will* break on the Swift 3 transition. On the other hand, Swift will have much better and more mature migration tools with additional time, not just a better language.

-- E