Swift 6.2 Released

Holly Borla from Apple's Swift Core Team just dropped Swift 6.2, and it's tackling the biggest pain point in modern development: making concurrent programming actually approachable. This isn't just another incremental update.

Swift 6.2 represents a major shift in how developers write concurrent code, with new defaults that eliminate boilerplate and prevent data races. The release also introduces systems programming features like InlineArray and Span, enhanced VS Code tooling, and official WebAssembly support. Apple's engineering team focused on real-world developer feedback to reduce friction across the entire development workflow.

Key Takeaways

• Main actor isolation by default eliminates explicit @MainActor annotations for UI code
• New @concurrent attribute makes parallel execution explicit and predictable
• InlineArray and Span types enable zero-overhead memory safety for systems programming
• VS Code extension now officially verified with background indexing and live DocC preview
• Pre-built swift-syntax dependencies eliminate expensive macro compilation in CI

The new Subprocess package and modernized NotificationCenter API hint at a broader Foundation overhaul that could reshape how you build Swift applications.