Apple has officially released Swift 3.1, which is included with Monday’s release of Xcode 8.3. The Apple development team’s focus will now move to Swift 4.
With Swift’s 3.0 release, the teams were looking to “solidify and mature the Swift language and development experience.” From Swift 3.1 and 4+, the language is set to remain source compatible with previous code bases. Swift 4 is expected to hit completion by Fall 2017.
The Swift team was recently highlighted in the news as the development languages original creator, Chris Lattner, left the team to join Tesla as that company’s VP of Autopilot Software.
IBM Big Supporter of Swift
The official Swift blog notes version 3.1 of the development language came to fruition with help from IBM and other contributors.
Swift 3.1 is now officially released! Swift 3.1 is a minor release that contains improvements and refinements to the Standard Library. Thanks to efforts by IBM and other members of the community, it also includes many updates to the Linux implementation of Swift. There are also a number of updates to Swift Package Manager. In addition, the Swift 3.1 compiler now automatically precompiles Objective-C bridging headers, which can speed up debug configuration builds of mixed-source projects.
IBM has been a major supporter of Swift, releasing numerous projects built around the Apple programming language, The company has developed the browser-based Swift Sandbox, as well as server-side Bluemix Runtime.
