ISSUE 685 November 1st 2024

Thanks to everyone who responded to last week’s question on what you hope for from WWDC 2025.

There were plenty of interesting responses, but before we get to the specifics I asked how optimistic you all were about Swift and Apple platform development. It can be easy to see only negative comments about a topic, especially if you go anywhere near social media, so I was a little nervous to see these results. 😬

I shouldn’t have worried, though, as your sentiments skewed positive. Swift got an average of 3.5 out of 5 and Apple platform development got a 4.0. It’s interesting to see Swift getting the lower of those two numbers, and from reading the comments, I know why. I filtered to only those people who felt pessimistic about Swift and there was a clear theme. Structured concurrency and language complexity came up in almost every Swift-specific comment. It even featured regularly up in those responses from people who felt optimistic about the language. It was a noticeable trend.

It’s easy to see the downsides of strict concurrency checking right now. We’re right in the middle of the most painful part of the transition. Developers are being asked to do something difficult and time-consuming without the promise of immediate or obvious benefits. It puts a significant burden on developers in an area that maybe wasn’t top of their priority list when planning what to work on next.

In the early days

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