Almost two years after its launch and four months since it was open sourced, Swift 2.2 has been released by Apple. The update is a major one because Swift now runs on Linux. Officially, Swift runs on Ubuntu 14.04 and Ubuntu 15.10 but it won't be long until it unofficially arrives on other distros such as Arch and Manjaro via the Arch User Repository (or AUR).
According to the release notes, "Swift 2.2 includes support for Swift on Linux. The Linux port is still relatively new and in this release does not include the Swift Core Libraries (which will appear in Swift 3). The port does, however, include LLDB and the REPL."
This update is the first that Swift has received since it was open-sourced on December 3, 2015. According to Apple, 212 non-Apple contributors helped with this release. Contributions spanned from simple bug fixes to enhancements and alterations to the core language and the Swift Standard Library.
Aside from Linux support, Swift 2.2 includes:
- SE-0001: Allow (most) keywords as argument labels
- SE-0015: Tuple comparison operators
- SE-0014: Constraining AnySequence.init
- SE-0011: Replace typealias keyword with associatedtype for associated type declarations
- SE-0021: Naming Functions with Argument Labels
- SE-0022: Referencing the Objective-C selector of a method
- SE-0020: Swift Language Version Build Configuration
- Numerous bug fixes
- Enhancements to diagnostics
- Faster-running code
The Swift Package Manager - a utility for managing the distribution of Swift code - is still in an early development stage and is therefore not included in this release.
Source: Swift blog via Phoronix
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