Swift 5.0 is scheduled to be released at the end of the year

After releasing the official version of 4.2 last week, the Swift development team updated the ” Swift 5.0 Release Process ” on the official website this week, focusing on the development goals, release process and estimated timeline of Swift 5.0.

The primary goal of Swift 5.0 is to make the language  ABI stable. At the same time, module stability is also a priority, and is implemented in Swift 5.0 or later 5.x versions depending on the development progress.

Unfortunately, Swift 5.0 is still not binary compatible with earlier versions of Swift. However, the development team said that subsequent versions of Swift would be binary compatible with Swift 5.

Regarding source compatibility, the Swift 5 compiler will be able to accept code written in Swift 4.2, but not in Swift 3 mode. Swift 4.2 is the last release to support the Swift 3 mode.

As for the release time, the development team said that according to the plan, November 16th, 2018 would be the last merge change, and then will enter a “baking” period, only to repair some critical things. When everything is ready, the official version will be ushered in.