Apple releases Swift 5.5 with concurrency improvements

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Apple has released version 5.5 of Swift. With this latest version of the open source programming language, the company has made a number of changes and improvements, including in the area of ​​concurrency.

Apple’s Swift Core Team calls Swift 5.5 itself a massive release, and the developers highlight concurrency features such as async/await, among other things. Other improvements include concurrency interoperability with Apple’s older programming language Objective-C and structured concurrency. The concurrency programming style was first introduced in C# and later implemented in Python and JavaScript, among others. It is a mechanism for writing efficient asynchronous code.

Chris Lattner, the original driving force behind the Swift project, pointed out the problems in dealing with asynchronous APIs in the programming language as early as 2017 in his Swift Concurrency Manifesto. He spoke, among other things, of a pyramid of doom to describe the problems that arise with many asynchronous settlements.

New in Swift 5.5 is also the support of package collections for the Swift Package Manager. The collections consist of Swift source code files and a manifest. The intention is to provide a curated list of collections, which will make it easier for users to discover existing packages for certain user scenarios.

Apple announced the arrival of Swift 5.5 in June at its WWDC virtual event. The company introduced Swift in 2014 as the successor to Objective-C for programming apps for its operating systems.

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