I’m really excited about the changes to Swift in the current Xcode 6.3 beta. Apple has answered several of my biggest gripes with Swift. Here are some of the highlights:

  • Incremental builds for increased build performance
  • Native Set collection class that bridges to NSSet, joining Array/NSArray and Dictionary/NSDictionary
  • static methods and properties support for classes
  • Improved type inference for single-expression closures
  • Swift enums can now be exported to Objective-C
  • let constants no longer need immediate initialization
  • General performance enhancements
  • General improvements to Swift-Objective-C interoperability

And my personal favorite:

  • Nested & enhanced optional binding

Now, this:

if let x = self.x {
    if let y = self.y {
        if let z = self.z {
            if z == true {
                // Do something at the top of the Pyramid of Doom!
            }
        }
    }
}

becomes this:

if let x = self.x, y = self.y, z = self.z where z == true {
    // Do Something without climbing the Pyramid!
}

Beautiful!

Apple has even included a handy Migration Tool to get your code from Swift version 1.1 to version 1.2.

There are a lot of other great changes as well (including enhancements to Objective-C) so head over to the Apple Developer Center to download the beta and read the full release notes.