Another two weeks have passed, so here’s another “Weekly” Brief. There’s lots of energy within the community at the moment, it seems — as there’s a lot going on.

Starter tasks

• SR-13119 [Compiler] Confusing diagnostic when checking conformance for IUO of generic parameter
• SR-13092 [Parser] operator $ produces two contradictory error messages

Podcasts

John Sundell discusses what’s been going on with SwiftUI with Josh Shaffer and Eliza Block from Apple.

News and community

Tom Doron announced Swift Service Lifecycle, a new open source project for the Swift server ecosystem. It is a Swift package designed to help server applications, also known as services, manage their startup and shutdown sequences.

Commits and pull requests

Mishal Shah merged a pull request that adds Apple Silicon support to the Swift continuous integration.

Proposals in review

SE-0284: Allow Multiple Variadic Parameters in Functions, Subscripts, and Initializers is under review.

Currently, variadic parameters in Swift are subject to two main restrictions:

• Only one variadic parameter is allowed per parameter list
• If present, the parameter which follows a variadic parameter must be labeled

This proposal seeks to remove the first restriction while leaving the second in place, allowing a function, subscript, or initializer to have multiple variadic parameters so long as every parameter which follows a variadic one has a label.

SE-0285: Ease the transition to concise magic file strings is under review.

In SE-0274, the core team accepted a proposal to change the behavior of #file. This proposal modifies that plan to transition into new behavior more gradually, treating it as a source break requiring a new language version mode to fully adopt.

Swift Forums

Steve Cannon shared the release notes for Swift Numerics 0.0.6.

Nicholas Maccharoli pitched a proposal to revist SE-0177: clamped(to:).

It has been a while since SE-0177 was sent back for revision (three years?) and it might be worth it to start a new thread here about what to do with SE-0177.

At the moment I have one pull request for the Swift Evolution repository and another pull request adding clamped as an extension on Comparable to the standard library.

I would love to start this discussion with everyone about what to do next until SE-0177 is complete.

Doug Gregor pitched a proposal for forward scan matching for trailing closures.

SE-0279 “Multiple Trailing Closures” threaded the needle between getting the syntax we wanted for multiple trailing closures without breaking source compatibility. One aspect of that compromise was to extend (rather than replace) the existing rule for matching a trailing closure to a parameter by scanning backward from the end of the parameter list.

I propose that we replace the backward scan used by the trailing closure matching rules with a forward scan, which is simpler and works better for APIs that support trailing closures (whether single or multiple) as well as default arguments. This is a source-breaking change that affects a small amount of code: I propose that we take the first (smallest) part of this source break immediately, to be finished by a slightly larger source break in Swift 6.

To get a feel for the new behavior, it really helps to write some code against it. I implemented this proposal in the Swift compiler, and have built both a Linux and a macOS toolchain that support it. Using this toolchain, you can experiment with the new behavior. Please try it out!

Suyash Srijan pitched a proposal to add a missing super call warning.

Introduce a new attribute to warn when an overridden function does not call the super method in its body.

It is quite common to override a method in order to add additional functionality to it, rather than to completely replace it.

At present, there is no way to communicate this need other than adding it to the documentation and even experienced developers sometimes overlook this small detail and later run into various issues at runtime.

In Objective-C, one can annotate a superclass method with the objc_requires_super attribute and the compiler emits a warning when an overridden method is missing a call to the super method in its body.

However, there is no such attribute in Swift.

Erica Sadun pitched a proposal to expand available to introduce discouraged.

Swift’s available attribute documents characteristics of a declaration’s lifecycle. The attribute specifies when a declaration became available on a given platform, and if it’s been deprecated, obsoleted, or renamed. We feel there’s room to further nuance available. This proposal expands available to introduce discouraged, making declarations harder to accidentally use.

chrisbia pitched a proposal to enable safe, non-optional, circular referencing with shared reference counts.

I don’t often come across a data modeling problem where circular referencing appears to be a good solution. In general I find that arguments that attempt to justify circular references appear contrived (Apartment <-> Person), and because of that lacking any true real world applicability. That said, circular referencing isn’t always an attempt at a data modeling solution, more often than not I find it’s an attempt at an encapsulation solution.

Often when defining complex models code files can become large and in an effort to make the repository more digestible functionality and properties are encapsulated into smaller bite-sized classes. The problem arises when some of those bite-sized classes require access to data within the original scope.

Andrew Arnopoulos pitched a proposal to allow property wrappers with multiple arguments to defer initialization when a wrappedValue is not specified.

Swift’s Property Wrappers allow for wrappers without arguments to defer specifying the wrappedValue until the initialization of the containing type. This proposal adds this feature to Property Wrappers that have multiple arguments by extending the current initializer synthesization.

Danny Sung pitched a proposal to invert guard let scoping.

I’m proposing the introduction of an inverted scope for the guard let pattern. The problem occurs most commonly when propagating errors to completion handlers.

Finally

Kids scholars these days…