Swift Just Got Sharper

Inside the 6.3 and 6.4 Release

From vanishing parentheses to a rebuilt ownership system, here’s everything that makes writing Swift faster, safer, and a little less annoying

Swift has a habit of getting better in ways you don’t notice until they’re gone. A parenthesis you no longer have to type. A warning that used to nag you for no good reason. That’s mostly what this release is about, small annoyances disappearing, plus a couple of genuinely big additions for people pushing performance to the limit.

Here’s everything that changed.

The stuff you’ll barely notice, until it’s not there anymore

Start with some and any. If you ever tried using either with an optional type, you probably remember wrapping it in parentheses to make the compiler happy. That requirement came out of Swift's operator precedence rules, and honestly, it was always a bit fussy. You can drop the parentheses now. The compiler figures out what you meant.

// Before
var shape: (any Shape)?

// Now
var shape: any Shape?

There’s a new warning for a real bug pattern too: silently swallowing an error thrown from a…