@dave
5.5-5.10: Transition. You can still pretend it's the old language if you like, but it's also increasingly clear what the future looks like. Time to stop using classes & inheritance in particular.
6.0: The value-oriented programming language we were promised that first WWDC. Finally sheds all pretense of ObjC compatibility. Safety is paramount.
@dave IDK, retrofitting an existing codebase for strict concurrency definitely has challenges (I find them fun, but they certainly take time away from new features).
OTOH, in a new codebase from scratch, yeah, OK, it's a new language that I'm a bit of a noob in, but in general I think it feels a whole heap better, I'm using design patterns I'm happier with, and I'm sure I'm not filling the thing with crash bugs that will be difficult to resolve later!
@dave Yeah, for anything like that it's probably too early still to really lean into the strict concurrency! Even Apple's SDKs aren't fully annotated yet, let alone the problematic APIs replaced (half of Foundation, for a start). UIKit and SwiftUI are mostly OK, but if you're stepping outside those, you're in for a world of pain. And third parties seem by & large to be even further behind. I reckon it'll be 2026 before the ecosystem as a whole skews concurrency-safe.
@dave And if you're really serious about leaning into SCC for that kind of thing, you'll have to also lean heavily into wrapping up the unsafe bits into modules which add the safety you're looking for. Substantial extra effort on your part, but possibly worth it in terms of simplifying your design & moving you ahead of the curve?
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