| Swift 6.2 Adds WebAssembly Support |
| Written by Kay Ewbank | |||
| Tuesday, 17 June 2025 | |||
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Swift 6.2 has been released with features to enhance performance, concurrency, and interoperability with other languages like C++, Java, and JavaScript. It also adds support for WebAssembly. Swift is Apple's language that was originally developed as an alternative language to Objective C. Swift's designers aim is to provide a single language including the best ideas from languages such as C# and JavaScript, while being easy to use. It was made open source by Apple in 2015, and a Linux build was added at that point. Swift 6 last year was the first major new release of the language for five years.  Swift 6 introduced strict concurrency checking, and Swift 6.2 continues this work with simplifications for writing single-threaded code. Developers can now configure modules or individual files to run on the main actor by default, eliminating the need for additional annotations. Other updates aimed at concurrency make asynchronous and concurrent code easier to write correctly. In a pragmatic move, Apple has made it easier for developers to approach concurrency only if and when they want to thanks to the ability to set your code to run as though it was single-threaded and run on a single actor by default. This enables you to only add concurrency details when you need them. Swift also adds support for Inline Arrays, so developers can declare fixed-size arrays, allowing for optimizations at compile time. This offers some performance improvements and combines features of tuples and variable size arrays. There's also a new Span type that provides a safe alternative to unsafe buffer pointers. Improved interoperability with C++, as well as expanded support for interfacing with Java, makes it easier to adopt Swift in your existing apps. Interoperability has also been improved, particularly with C and C++. Apple says developers can incrementally adopt Swift in existing C, C++, and Objective-C apps to make their code safer and more efficient. This runs alongside the swift-java interoperability project, that lets developers bring Swift into their Java code. Finally, Apple has announced a new Containerisation framework that lets developers create, download, or run Linux container images directly on Mac. It's built on an open-source framework optimised for Apple silicon and provides secure isolation between container images. Swift 6.2 is available now. More InformationRelated ArticlesSwift 5.2 Improves Performance Swift Adds More Generics Support Swift 4 Improves String Handling Apple Launches Swift Playgrounds To be informed about new articles on I Programmer, sign up for our weekly newsletter, subscribe to the RSS feed and follow us on Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin. 
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