A lot has happened in the past two weeks. Apple introduced a new open source framework, a new Xcode beta was released (with improved compile-times!) and Swift 4.2 was announced. And of course, Swift 5 has seen another two weeks of progress.

So, without further ado…

Starter tasks

• SR-6979 [Compiler] thin_to_thick_function derived pointers do not need to be retained/released
• SR-6960 [Standard Library] Floating-point nextUp and nextDown are unnecessarily slow for concrete types
• SR-6889 [Compiler] Use ArgMemOnly for runtime functions
• SR-6789 [Foundation] IndexPath needs benchmarks

Submit a task by sending a pull request or opening an issue.

Swift Unwrapped

In episode 48, Jesse and JP discuss the Google Summer Of Code 2018 and Swift’s participation in the project. In episode 49, they discuss Dave DeLong’s Swift Protocol Wishlist, looking at the possibilities of Swift Protocols without boundaries.

News and community

Apple released Xcode 9.3 beta 4. Erica Sadun wrote about some of the included Swift changes (canImport and targetEnvironment).

Ted Kremenek announced Swift 4.2 and its planned release process. Swift 4.2 “is meant to be a waypoint towards achieving ABI stability in Swift 5 [..] as well as have a goal of some focused improvements on compile-time performance”. 🎉

Jordan Rose wrote a blog post exploring types with multiple RawValues.

Ben Asher shared their clean build times (with the “old” build system) decreased by 4 minutes compared to Xcode 9.2; from 11 minutes to 7 minutes, that’s a 36% speedup!

Alfredo Delli Bovi shared similar results, going from 7 and a half minutes to 5. 🏎

At try! Swift, Norman Maurer introduced SwiftNIO, “a cross-platform asynchronous event-driven network application framework for rapid development of maintainable high performance protocol servers & clients”. Interesting to note is that they are using GitHub Issues; no JIRA!

Vapor then integrated with SwiftNIO mere days after the announcement. They were able to delete nearly 15.000 lines of code! 😮

Marcin Krzyżanowski wrote how they created a first-class Swift API for an Objective-C framework, using all the amazing bridging and attributes available.

Commits and pull requests

Karoy Lorentey worked on a pull request to use SipHash-1-3 for all hashing.

This PR intends to improve matters by standardizing on a high quality hash function, SipHash, for use inside the standard library and inside compiler-synthesized Hashable implementations. (SipHash is already implemented in the Standard Library, but so far it has been sitting there largely unused.)

This pull request does not introduce a public API to help with manual Hashable implementations — but it provides the first step towards providing one.

Harlan Haskins created a pull request that makes SwiftSyntax build on Linux.

Michael Ilseman worked on a pull request that could speedup ObjC bridging 2.5 times. 😱

Accepted proposals

SE-0198: Playground QuickLook API Revamp was accepted with a minor revision.

The new API for customizing playground display will be adopted, and the previous API deprecated, as described in the proposal. However, the new protocol will remain part of the standard library rather than moving to the playground support library, in order to facilitate frameworks that want to ship with built-in custom playground display capability.

SE-0199: Adding toggle to Bool was accepted.

The review of SE-199 has ended, and the proposal has been accepted as-is. There was some discussion during the review of alternative names, but the team felt that toggle() was the best one offered.

Swift Forums

Jordan Rose shared an update on SE-0192:

Over the last few weeks I’ve been discussing this with the core team, who pretty much all agreed that this is not the right direction for third-party libraries.

I’m working on cutting down the proposal text (and the implementation) to match this feedback from the core team.

Finally

Did you know that enum was once called oneof — and union?