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Chris Lattner made an announcement this week about the scope of the 3.0 release. The good news is that the date won't (or more likely, can't) slip, but unfortunately the stable ABI is going to be pushed into Swift 4, where it will be the highest priority.

I'm not too worried about the postponing of the stable ABI. Yes it means a larger binary and an inability to use precompiled libraries, but I’m not sure that’s stopping a huge amount of people from adopting the language. Note, I’m not saying it’s not stopping anyone, just that the group this affects is fairly small.

How much of this postponement is due to the massive success of the open source Swift project? The community has contributed a huge amount of proposals for the language, and many of them have been implemented or are targeted for 3.0.

My guess? It’s likely that this volume of high quality community input came as a surprise to the Swift team. Certainly, if it was still closed source, the scope and features of Swift 3 would have been different.

Is this a good thing? Well, delays are proof that the Swift team aren't superhuman and Apple need to keep an eye on priorities. However, I’d say it’s a net positive, and I’m pretty happy with how the development process for Swift has turned out.

Dave Verwer  

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