What was introduced with Swift 5 update?
Swift 5 release has brought couple of most awaited changes and few extra and this release can be easily marked as major change in direction of upgraded language. With new update any mobile app development company can use Swift 5 for major applications for all four major Apple platforms macOS, tvOs, watchOS and iOS. The new changes also lay foundation stone for future upgrades that will further make Swift richer and development-friendly language. Stable ABI Stable ABI is one of the longstanding due that got finally cleared in this update. This new feature will make Swift application smaller and capable of running on macOS, tvOs, watchOS and iOS. ABI stability also brings binary compatibility which means Swift application developed and compiled on any Swift version would be able to interact with in-built libraries of the operating system. Binary compatibility will make apps smaller as application will no more need to carry libraries along. Binary compatibility also promises more matured development across different OSs like Linux, windows. In current version with binary stability developer can enjoy Module stability as well. This new development removes the restriction that was there of not using MagicKit if it was complied on
another version. Now user can use any module, like in Xcode, without worrying about the version it was compiled on. Library evolution is another addition that expels the need to recompile the library in case of any update. This new feature even gives freedom from recompilation in the cases where one binary framework of a company is dependent on another binary framework of other company. If either of the framework is updated it will not require recompiling another framework. Library updates This new addition will bring world of relief for any iphone app development company and for any mobile app development company catering iOS app development. New library updates provide few new facilities like – UTF-8 encoding that facilitates faster coding, more support for text in string literals, standard library contains SIMD and result vector types, more flexibility to convert text from data and improvements in dictionary and set. Language and compiler updates Swift 5 support dynamic callable types, this means that now Swift has improved interoperability with other dynamic languages. With some serious development going on in different dynamic languages like python interoperability establishes Swift as major languages for iphone application development that works smoothly with python, Javascript and Ruby. Dependency mirroring in package manager is useful for various reasons – it allows dependency to be fetched even if original source has been changed or deleted, and mirroring can help with screening the updates before making it available internally. Compatibility with older versions Swift 5 is compatible with older versions of language Swift 4, 4.1 and 4.2. The Xcode 10.2 comes with migration tool that handles major source code changes. Now with new changes in Swift 5 any iphone app development company can release apps that work for other Apple platforms as well. The major benefit of new changes is assurance of further updates that will make language richer and more usable for coding. The interaction with other languages further paves way for faster development and addition of new features in near future.