Swift Language Updates from WWDC22

Swift just got a massive upgrade. Feli Bernutz, Matthaus Woolard, and Natalia Panferova break down the Swift 5.6 and 5.7 releases that are reshaping how iOS teams write concurrent, type-safe code.

WWDC22 brought two major Swift releases packed with language improvements, from regex literals to distributed actors. This deep dive covers the ecosystem changes, package manager updates, and concurrency enhancements that shipped in Swift 5.6 (March 2022) and Swift 5.7 (beta with Xcode 14).

Key Takeaways

• Regex literals with named captures and RegexBuilder make string processing dramatically cleaner
• Primary associated types and 'some' parameters simplify generic code without constraints
• Distributed actors enable server-side clustered systems with built-in isolation
• Swift Package Manager now validates fingerprints and supports module disambiguation
• New Async Algorithms package includes debounce, throttle, merge for AsyncSequence

The article includes a clever Bird of the Year competition example that makes protocol improvements surprisingly easy to grasp.