Changes in the Swift Standard Library in Beta 7

There aren’t any.

Well, actually there’s one:

  • The ImplicitlyUnwrappedOptional type, which ceased to be of BooleanType in beta 6, no longer has the associated vestigial boolValue property.

Ok, Ok there are a couple more:

  • The comparison function taken by non-member sort, sorted and partition is now labelled isOrderedBefore (matching the member versions). Not that it’s an external parameter, so no code change needed.
  • Further enhancements to some function documentation comments (for example min() now has a description).

I think… that’s it. I have to admit, I don’t diff all the operators each time, as they seem to constantly reorder with each beta. That’s how I missed that, between beta 3 and beta 4, you stopped being able to use === to determine if two arrays referenced the same underlying storage. Shame on me!

There’s one operator that hasn’t changed. Despite what the release notes say, you still seem to be able to use + to concatenate Characters:

let c1: Character = "a"
let c2: Character = "b"
let s = c1 + c2
// s is now the String "ab"

…but presumably it’s not long for this world. This is in keeping with the trend of having + only work between two collection types, not between collection types and their contained types.

I guess this stabilization of the Swift library is in readyness for the Swift 1.0 release, which is pretty great news. The interesting question is, how will the library keep evolving post-1.0?

One thought on “Changes in the Swift Standard Library in Beta 7

  1. Considering the fact that the standard library is included in all Swift apps I think it will change a lot going forward, just like the language will.

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