Swift 6, now broadly accessible, marks a significant upgrade to the programming language as it extends its utility to a wider range of platforms and areas beyond the initial confines of Apple operating systems.

This version introduces stringent concurrency checks that assist developers in identifying data races during the compilation phase. Such races can lead to applications crashing, behaving unpredictably, or corrupting user data. Apple indicates that data races can be tricky to detect and fix since they depend on the sequence of concurrent operations, and detecting them during compilation helps ensure their absence in applications.

Swift 6 starts a new phase towards making data-race safety significantly more accessible. The development team is actively working on enhancing the usability of data-race safety, and they value user feedback to guide further enhancements, as detailed in their blog post.

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Another benefit of this release is expanded platform support across new Linux distributions and Windows architectures. Swift 6 adds support for Debian, Fedora, and Ubuntu 24.04, and its toolchains are now available on arm64 architectures on Windows. According to the Swift development team, with this release the package manager now parallelizes builds across multiple cores on Windows, which can significantly improve build performance.

Swift 6 also adds support for fully static SDKs for Linux, which have no external dependencies and can be installed directly onto a system without installing any additional software.

This release also expands interoperability with C++, after bidirectional interoperability was first introduced in Swift 5.9. Now, Swift supports C++ move-only types, virtual methods, default arguments, and more standard library types, like std::map and std::optional.

Additionally, when calling a C++ function or method that has some default argument values, Swift now uses those defaults instead of requiring you to explicitly pass an argument.

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