<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><br class=""><div><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class="">On Apr 18, 2017, at 12:00 AM, David Hart via swift-evolution <<a href="mailto:swift-evolution@swift.org" class="">swift-evolution@swift.org</a>> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><div class=""><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=us-ascii" class=""><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div class="">Hello community,</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">I'm happy to see that SE-0169 got accepted and that we've patched the issues of SE-0025. But it's been a difficult process. And I can't stop asking myself if it could have been avoided. The crux of the problem is that source-compatibility is now becoming a very strong requirement. But at the same time, Swift is still missing some very big systems: reflection, property behaviours, a concurrency paradigm. How can we continue to push Swift boldly forward with very little leeway to correct our mistakes?</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Then I listened to the latest episode of the excellent [Swift Unwrapped podcast](<a href="https://spec.fm/podcasts/swift-unwrapped" class="">https://spec.fm/podcasts/swift-unwrapped</a>) where they talk about the access control "saga" and ask themselves the same questions as above. One interesting idea got my attention: JavaScript has a natural breeding ground for future language features with Babel. For those who don't know, it's a transcompiler that compiles bleeding-edge JavaScript into versions supported in browsers. Perhaps Swift could also benefit from a similar experimentation time for each new proposal.</div></div></div></blockquote><br class=""></div><div>I listened to the same podcast (which is generally great btw, even if it doesn’t get all the details right), but they miss an important fact: Swift *does* have an important beta cycle (typically started at WWDC) for major releases of the language. One very important thing with Swift 4 vs Swift 3 is that hopefully there is no feature work for Swift 4 after WWDC, meaning that the only changes are those that are responding to developer usage experience with the new stuff.</div><div><br class=""></div><div>Also, it remains to be seen, but I strongly believe that we’ve ended up in a good place with access control. The process was painful, but worthwhile to reach a great result.</div><div><br class=""></div><div>-Chris</div><div><br class=""></div><br class=""></body></html>