Apple Has Officially Released Swift 4.0 Programming Language

Swift 4 is now officially released! Swift 4 builds on the strengths of Swift 3, delivering greater robustness and stability, providing source code compatibility
with Swift 3, making improvements to the standard library, and adding features like archival and serialization.

Apple has called Swift 4.0 a major language release that aims to deliver better stability. It comes with Swift 3 code compatibility and also makes improvements to the standard library.

Swift 4.0 release includes a faster and easier to use String implementation that helps one retain Unicode correctness, adding support for different substring operations.

This update enables type-safe serialization to external formats along with the support for archival of struct and enum types.

A welcome change in Swift 4.0 comes in the form of two new language modes, i.e., Swift 3.2 and Swift 4.0. Now you don’t need to modify your code to use the new compiler version.

New workflow features and more complete API for Swift package have also been introduced to help you develop packages easily.

It’s also worth noting that Swift 4.0 ships as a part of Xcode 9. Official binaries for Ubuntu 16.10, Ubuntu 16.04 and Ubuntu 14.04 are available for download. Find Swift’s code here on GitHub.

You can find more set of changes here in the announcement post.