Swift 6.4 lands with a unified build system and 40x faster WebAssembly bridging
Swift 6.4 Released
Swift 6.4 is out, making Swift Build the default in Swift Package Manager for consistent builds across Linux, macOS, and Windows. The Subprocess library hits 1.0, C++20 std::span now bridges directly with Swift's Span, and JavaScriptKit's WebAssembly bridging is up to 40 times faster. Embedded Swift gains existential types and richer error handling, while new non-copyable array types and the Iterable protocol cut copies without sacrificing memory safety.
Swift 6.4 makes it easier to avoid unnecessary copies of your data while staying memory-safe, extending earlier work on Span, non-copyable types, and InlineArray.
- airstrafer
A very solid release with very nice immediate conveniences/improvements and foundational long term work.
I’m particularly impressed at the team’s continued investment in non-Apple platforms. IMO, true cross platform Swift codebases still seems out of reach for most shops. But if they keep this up for a few more years then Swift could become a very compelling cross platform language — for both systems and application programming.
The big hurdle they need to figure out is the standard library and especially SwiftUI. SwiftUI is the single most important library that essentially all Apple swift codebases use, so until there is a real cross platform SwiftUI then for app programming IMO Swift will remain a novelty.
There are other frameworks, like eg Network.framework, which really should be in the stdlib as well.
- tancop
I love the friendly competition between Swift, Rust and Zig. Swift has been adding borrow checking features for a while, now they also have arenas, better C interop and more language support for non GC platforms.
- bnchrch
Happy to see Swift progress. Its a beautiful language and well thought out. Would love to see it expand outside of iOS
- lemonginger
As a coder of 30+ years in various other languages that sincerely wants to learn Swift can someone please help me understand why it is not diametrically opposed for a company to suggest, effectively in the same breath no less, that I should learn to code Swift myself and/or just have some AI do it?
Every time I set out to learn I just feel like I'm being an idiot because in a year, or now, nobody will hand code anything. And even if we still reckon that some knowledge will be required to verify the voluminous output of AI there is now a vast moat of Jr. unemployability that has arisen making it exponentially harder to justify learning to code in the first place?
groan
- afavour
I didn’t realise Swift in WebAssembly has come as far as it has. I’ll be interested to try it out, I’ve used Rust before now but Swift is definitely easier to work with.