The Xcode 16.3 beta is out, which includes a new version of Swift. Swift 6.1 is a relatively small release that comes with bug fixes, quality of life improvements, and some features. In this post, I’d like to explore two of the new features that come with Swift 6.1. One that you can start using immediately, and one that you can opt-in on if it makes sense for you. The features I’d like to explore are the following: Changes to Task Groups in Swift 6.1 Changes to member visibility for imported code We’ll start by looking at the changes in...

On iOS 17 and newer, you have access to the Observable macro. This macro can be applied to classes, and it allows SwiftUI to officially observe properties on an observable class. If you want to learn more about Observable or if you're looking for an introduction, definitely go ahead and check out my introduction to @Observable in SwiftUI. In this post, I would like to explore how you can observe properties on an observable class. While the ObservableObject protocol allowed us to easily observe published properties, we don't have something like that with Observable. However, that doesn't mean we cannot...

When Apple released Xcode 16 last year, they made the Swift 6 compiler available along with it. This means that we can create new projects using Swift 6 and its compile-time data race protections. However, the big question for many developers is: Is 2025 the right time to adopt Swift 6 fully, or should we stick with Swift 5 for now? In this post, I won’t give you a definitive answer. Instead, I’ll share my perspective and reasoning to help you decide whether adopting Swift 6 is right for you and your project(s). The right answer depends on loads of...

Code has dependencies. It’s something that I consider universally true in one way or another. Sometimes these dependencies are third party dependencies while other times you’ll have objects that depend on other objects or functionality to function. Even when you write a function that should be called with a simple input like a number, that’s a dependency. We often don’t really consider the small things the be dependencies and this post will not focus on that at all. In an earlier post, I’ve written about using closures as dependencies, also known as protocol witnesses. In this post I’d like to...

We all know that print is the most ubiquitous and useful debugging tool in a developer’s toolbox. Sure, we have breakpoints too but what’s the fun in that? Sprinkling some prints throughout our codebase to debug a problem is way more fun! And of course when we print more than we can handle we just add some useful prefixes to our messages and we’re good to go again. What if i told that you can do way better with just a few lines of code. You can send your prints to more places, give them a priority, and more. Of...

Swift offers multiple ways to iterate over a collection of items. In this post we’ll compare a normal for loop to calling forEach on a collection. Both for x in collection and collection.forEach { x in } allow you to iterate over elements in a collection called collection. But what are their differences? Does one outperform the other? Is one better than the other? We’ll find out in this post. Using a regular for loop I’ve written about for loops in Swift before so if you want an in-depth look, take a look at this post. A regular for loop...

Swift 5.5 introduced loads of new concurrency related features. One of these features is the MainActor annotation that we can apply to classes, functions, and properties. In this post you’ll learn several techniques that you can use to dispatch your code to the main thread from within Swift Concurrency’s tasks or by applying the main actor annotation. If you’d like to take a deep dive into learning how you can figure out whether your code runs on the main actor I highly recommend reading this post which explores Swift Concurrency’s isolation features. Alternatively, if you’re interested in a deep dive...

If you’re keen on reading about what’s new in Swift or learn about all the cool things that are coming up, you’re probably following several folks in the iOS community that keep track and tell you about all the new things. But what if you read about an upcoming Swift feature that you’d like to try out? Do you have to wait for it to become available in a new Xcode release? Sometimes the answer is Yes, you’ll have to wait. But more often than not a Swift evolution proposal will have a header that looks a bit like this:...

It’s common for developers to leverage protocols as a means to model and abstract dependencies. Usually this works perfectly well and there’s really no reason to try and pretend that there’s any issue with this approach that warrants an immediate switch to something else. However, protocols are not the only way that we can model dependencies. Often, you’ll have a protocol that holds a handful of methods and properties that dependents might need to access. Sometimes, your protocol is injected into multiple dependents and they don’t all need access to all properties that you’ve added to your protocol. Also, when...

The long awaited iOS 17.4 and iPadOS 17.4 have just been released which means that we could slowly but surely start seeing alternative app stores to appear if you’re an EU iOS user. Alongside the 17.4 releases Apple has made Xcode 15.3 and Swift 5.10 available. There’s not a huge number of proposals included in Swift 5.10 but that doesn’t make this release less significant. With Swift 5.10, Apple has managed to close some large gaps that existed in Swift Concurrency’s data safety features. In short, this means that the compiler will be able to catch more possible thread safety...