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swiftlang/swift-evolution

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This maintains proposals for changes and user-visible enhancements to the Swift Programming Language.

154 mentions on Hacker News by 105 people: 41 stories, 113 comments · first 2015-12-03 · latest 2026-07-10

Mentions per year 154 mentions · busiest year 2016 (24)
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  1. …generate it with std::views::enumerate. That’s why Swift completely removed that kind of for loop ( https://github.com/swiftlang/swift-evolution/blob/main/propo... ) > This stuff compiles to broadly the same assembly. At the cost of…
    comment by Someone · 2026-07-10 · in Almost Always Unsigned
  2. …interface, in addition to the usual string-ey interface that allows composition. [1]: https://github.com/swiftlang/swift-evolution/blob/main/propo... [2]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/regexbuilder
    comment by woadwarrior01 · 2026-06-28 · in Regular expressions that work “everywhere”
  3. >[1] https://github.com/swiftlang/swift-evolution/blob/main/propo ... -- apologies to the authors, but even as a previous C++ guy, my brain twisted at that. Inside Swift is a slim language waiting to get out... and that slim language is…
    comment by anextio · 2026-03-02 · in Why Objective-C
  4. …its recommended language. (There's a decent argument it encountered it in iOS and macOS too.) [1] https://github.com/swiftlang/swift-evolution/blob/main/propo... -- apologies to the authors, but even as a previous C++ guy, my brain twisted…
    comment by vintagedave · 2026-03-02 · in Why Objective-C
  5. https://github.com/swiftlang/swift-evolution/blob/main/propo... https://github.com/swiftlang/swift-evolution/blob/main/propo... https://github.com/swiftlang/swift-evolution/blob/main/propo... https://github.com/swiftlang/swift-evolution/blo…
    comment by hn-acct · 2026-02-01 · in Swift is a more convenient Rust (2023)
  6. …not believe that regular Swift is suitable. Meaning that you're undeniably completely wrong. [0]: https://github.com/swiftlang/swift-evolution/blob/main/visio...
    comment by gjajric2 · 2025-12-10 · in Rust in the kernel is no longer experimental
  7. Swift gained limited support for “typed throws” in Swift 6.0 (2024). https://github.com/swiftlang/swift-evolution/blob/main/propo... I say limited because the compiler doesn't (yet, as of 6.2) perform typed throw inference for closures (a…
    comment by mayoff · 2025-11-12 · in Problems with C++ exceptions
  8. …than full native applications (although that's certainly a goal, albeit a very long term one). [1]: https://github.com/swiftlang/swift-evolution/pull/2946/files
    comment by objclxt · 2025-10-24 · in The Swift SDK for Android
  9. They are actually working on that now with approchable concurrency[1]. [1] https://github.com/swiftlang/swift-evolution/blob/main/visio...
    comment by frizlab · 2025-09-01 · in Isolated(any)
  10. …and maybe that can serve as a foundation for getting to the same level of interop for Obj-C. [1]: https://github.com/swiftlang/swift-evolution/blob/main/propo... [2]: https://www.swift.org/documentation/cxx-interop/
    comment by andrewjl · 2025-09-01 · in CocoaPods trunk read-only plan
  11. …life hack: for new language features, copy-pasting the Swift Evolution proposal works pretty well! https://github.com/swiftlang/swift-evolution/tree/main/propo...
    comment by _mattt · 2025-08-29 · in Show HN: Sosumi.ai – Convert Apple Developer docs to AI-readable Markdown
  12. …interested Yet they are adding lifetime dependency annotations to Swift, making it more like Rust: https://github.com/swiftlang/swift-evolution/blob/ef71df4158... The reason for this is that static analysis simply cannot do it when the…
    comment by anextio · 2025-06-28 · in Rust in the Linux kernel: part 2
  13. There’s a section in the proposal about this: https://github.com/swiftlang/swift-evolution/blob/main/propo... Tl;dr: Sequence and Collection are incompatible with noncopyable types and conditionally conforming when elements are copyable…
    comment by adamwk · 2025-05-10 · in What’s new in Swift 6.2
  14. …feature to getting it implemented and shipped is out in the open for everyone to participate/see. https://github.com/swiftlang/swift-evolution
    comment by rcruzeiro · 2025-05-10 · in What’s new in Swift 6.2
  15. …at Apple, like iBoot firmware. https://support.apple.com/en-jo/guide/security/sec30d8d9ec1/... https://github.com/swiftlang/swift-evolution/blob/main/visio... Once upon a time, C compilers were quite lousy versus handwritten 8 and 16 bit…
    comment by pjmlp · 2025-04-07 · in Apple’s Darwin OS and XNU Kernel Deep Dive
  16. …Swift dropped C-style for loops only 10 years ago (10 years isn’t long in language design time) ( https://github.com/swiftlang/swift-evolution/blob/main/propo... ), and there still is the difference between pascal for loops, where the…
    comment by Someone · 2025-03-18 · in I don't think error handling is a solved problem in language design
  17. Swift does that. https://github.com/swiftlang/swift-evolution/blob/main/propo...
    comment by mayoff · 2025-02-01 · in In Zig, what's a writer?
  18. …how Swift Structured Concurrency (Task API) utilizes and propagates QoS is in the proposal doc. https://github.com/swiftlang/swift-evolution/blob/main/propo...
    comment by eunoia · 2024-11-29 · in Prioritize work at the task level
  19. …Swift code, to write subclasses of C++ classes in Swift, etc. without giving up performance. See https://github.com/swiftlang/swift-evolution/blob/main/visio... and the video linked to in https://forums.swift.org/t/video-swift-as-c-successo…
    comment by Someone · 2024-11-14 · in Safe and efficient C++ interoperability via non-escapable types and lifetimes
  20. …I hadn’t read this before, and it changes how I’ll approach them. Thanks for pointing it out! https://github.com/swiftlang/swift-evolution/blob/main/propo...
    comment by brantonb · 2024-09-17 · in Swift 6
  21. You can read about the trade-offs in the language proposal here: https://github.com/swiftlang/swift-evolution/blob/main/propo... In particular: > Even with the introduction of typed throws into Swift, the existing (untyped) throws remains…
    comment by airspeedswift · 2024-09-17 · in Swift 6
  22. …allows one to create a lifetime dependency between a function's return value and its parameters: https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution/blob/d9aa90bae13e35...
    comment by adamwk · 2024-06-10 · in Deep Dive into Ownership in Mojo
  23. …how well those paths are supported. 0. https://github.com/apple/swift/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md 1. https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution/blob/main/proposals... 2. https://github.com/apple/swift-package-manager/pull/3905
    comment by pdpi · 2024-05-06 · in Swift's native Clocks are inefficient
  24. …We're building a roadmap now and would love to make sure our work items are comprehensive. [1] https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution/blob/main/visions/e... [2] https://www.swift.org/blog/sswg-update-2024/ [3]…
    comment by timsneath · 2024-04-15 · in Swift for C++ Practitioners, Part 1: Intro and Value Types
  25. That is the direction that Swift went: https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution/blob/main/proposals...
    comment by conradev · 2024-03-31 · in Overview: What are Cpp2 and cppfront? How do I get and build cppfront?
  26. A Vision for Embedded Swift ( https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution/blob/main/visions/e... ) has the details on this new build mode and is quite interesting. Effectively, there will be two bottom layers of Swift, and the lower one,…
    comment by glhaynes · 2024-03-12 · in Byte-Sized Swift: Building Tiny Games for the Playdate
  27. Detailed rationale is in the Swift Evolution proposal ( https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution/blob/main/proposals... ) This also isn’t a problem specific to Swift. Many strongly typed languages run into it. Examples: - C# (…
    comment by Someone · 2024-03-08 · in Iterate over Parameter Packs in Swift 6.0
  28. …They're not in the type system formally so maybe they're closer to poloneius work [1]: https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution/blob/3055becc53a3c3...
    comment by adamwk · 2024-03-04 · in Borrow checking without lifetimes
  29. …approach for safe concurrency that builds on Milano et al’s ideas (shared co-author as well): https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution/blob/main/proposals...
    comment by riscy · 2024-03-01 · in Functional ownership through fractional uniqueness
  30. …aren’t going away but Apple is trying to evolve the language to cater to various performance needs. https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution/blob/main/proposals...
    comment by adamwk · 2024-01-13 · in Apple hiring compiler developers for improving Swift / C++ interoperability
  31. …time. Not to mention recently added support for non-copyable types that enforces unique ownership: https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution/blob/main/proposals...
    comment by daaaaaaan · 2023-10-03 · in Crafting Self-Evident Code with D
  32. …addTwo = add(2) addTwo(3) That functionality was removed, though. For reasoning behind that, see https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution/blob/main/proposals... .
    comment by Someone · 2023-09-03 · in Currying in Kotlin
  33. …a language that doesn’t have indexes at all would be viable. Swift abandoned C-style for loops ( https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution/blob/main/proposals... ) It still has enumerated ( https://developer.apple.com/documentation/swift/seq…
    comment by Someone · 2023-06-10 · in Ask HN: Can Lua be remade to use 0-based numbering?
  34. …their name). It’s not just a SwiftUI thing, they’re also used for regular expressions for example: https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution/blob/main/proposals...
    comment by slavapestov · 2023-06-07 · in Ownership in Swift: Manifesto and meta-proposal (2017)
  35. …type, and when this happens currently there are no solutions; There's now a warning about this: https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution/blob/main/proposals... . What other solutions can there be other than making it a hard error? It seems…
    comment by slavapestov · 2023-06-06 · in Ownership in Swift: Manifesto and meta-proposal (2017)
  36. Just last week owning and borrowing parameters got accepted as well. https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution/blob/main/proposals... It’s been the focus for a while especially after the concurrency work. It’s probably the final major…
    comment by adamwk · 2023-06-06 · in Ownership in Swift: Manifesto and meta-proposal (2017)
  37. …www.hackingwithswift.com/articles/258/whats-new-in-s... , which refers to a few Swift Evolution docs: https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution/blob/main/proposals... https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution/blob/main/proposals...…
    comment by Someone · 2023-06-06 · in Ownership in Swift: Manifesto and meta-proposal (2017)
  38. Swift 5.9 dropped at WWDC, and with it came with noncopyable value types: https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution/blob/main/proposals... as well as a way to explicitly move types: https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution/blob/main/proposal…
    comment by conradev · 2023-06-06 · in Ownership in Swift: Manifesto and meta-proposal (2017)
  39. …out how to backport async/await, it's just impossible to use in a serious library otherwise. [0] https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution/blob/main/proposals...
    comment by plagiarist · 2023-06-06 · in SwiftData
  40. …), but got rid of it when it removed C-style for loops altogether in Swift 3 (September 2016) ( https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution/blob/main/proposals... )
    comment by Someone · 2023-05-10 · in Since Go 1.22, loop {for I, p:= 0, new(int); p = &I; {p = &I}} might never exit
  41. …necessary. If those issues can be fixed, the language can become easier to write. An example is https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution/blob/main/proposals... . As to that if , I wouldn’t know whether that holds. For example,…
    comment by Someone · 2023-03-25 · in How big should a programming language be?
  42. …writers to make this optimization. Swift even chose to remove for loops that step a variable ( https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution/blob/main/proposals... ), and I don’t think Rust has them, either. I think that’s the right decision.…
    comment by Someone · 2023-02-21 · in Low-Level Software Security for Compiler Developers
  43. https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution/blob/main/proposals...
    comment by jupp0r · 2023-01-12 · in Apple announces full Swift rewrite of the Foundation framework (2022)
  44. …and the package manager does so by default when targeting Linux since the acceptance of SE-0342: https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution/blob/main/proposals...
    comment by stephencanon · 2023-01-12 · in Apple announces full Swift rewrite of the Foundation framework (2022)
  45. …re-renders, but the implementation is non-trivial due to an undocumented feature in Swift [0]. [0] https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution/blob/main/proposals...
    comment by fingerlocks · 2022-11-28 · in SwiftUI Is Convenient, but Slow
  46. …explains the motivation for it: https://elizarov.medium.com/structured-concurrency-722d765aa... https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution/blob/main/proposals...
    comment by didibus · 2022-09-21 · in JDK 19 Release Notes
  47. …Swift has short literals, and (AFAIK) you can mix and match the DSL and the short literals. https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution/blob/main/proposals... gives this example: // A regex for extracting a currency (dollars or pounds) and…
    comment by Someone · 2022-06-10 · in Rulex – A new, portable, regular expression language
  48. …Or are they trying to push more the language in general? I can find a bit more information here ( https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution/blob/main/proposals... ): > With distributed actors, we acknowledge that the world we live in is…
    comment by Zababa · 2022-06-09 · in Distributed Actors in Swift
  49. Also https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution/blob/main/proposals...
    comment by b3morales · 2022-06-07 · in Regex Literals in Swift
  50. …control flow that prevents some kinds of bugs. That's why Swift added it before concurrency: https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution/blob/main/proposals... Some languages have async/await sugar built around futures instead; this is a…
    comment by astrange · 2022-05-31 · in Lunatic brings Erlang's principles to WebAssembly