General Availability of Swift 6: Announced with expansion to more platforms and domains.

• Beyond App Development: Not just for app development but also great for libraries, internet-scale services, and performance-critical/secure code.

New Low-Level Programming Features:

• Data-Race Safety: New opt-in language mode in Swift 6 to prevent data races in concurrent code. Data-race safety checks previously available as warnings in Swift 5.10.
• Synchronization Library: For low-level concurrency APIs like atomic operations and mutex API.
• Typed Throws: Functions can specify the type of error they throw as part of the signature, useful in generic code and resource-constrained environments.
• Generic Support for Non-Copyable Types: Swift 6 supports non-copyable types with the generics system, enabling generic code to work with both copyable and non-copyable types.
• Switch Statements and Non-Copyable Types: Switch statements can avoid copying within enum pattern-matching operations and are used with non-copyable payloads.
• C++ Interoperability: Expands interoperability support to C++ move-only types, virtual methods, default arguments, and more standard library types.
• Embedded Swift: A language subset and compilation mode for embedded software development with support for ARM and RISC-V bare-metal targets.
• 128-Bit Integer Types: Adds signed and unsigned 128-bit integer types available on all Swift platforms.

Productivity Enhancements:

• count(where:), pack iteration, access control for imports, @attached(body) macros, expression macros as default arguments, etc.

Debugging Enhancements:

• @DebugDescription macro to customize object display in LLDB and Xcode/VSCode variables view.
• Dramatically improves debugger startup performance with explicit module builds.

Foundation Updates:

• Unifies the implementation of Foundation across all platforms with a modern, portable Swift implementation.
• Core types like JSONDecoder, URL, etc. are reimplemented in Swift.
• New Foundation APIs available on all platforms with community involvement.

Platform Support:

• Major improvements to Linux and Windows, including support for more distributions and architectures.
• Fully statically linked executables for Linux.
• Official support and testing for Debian, Fedora, and Ubuntu 24.04.
• Prebuilt toolchains for arm64 architecture on Windows with improved compiler performance and parallel builds.

Learning and Resources:

• The Swift Programming Language book updated.
• Swift.org/getting-started offers tutorials for different use cases.
• Swift package ecosystem with package highlights at Swift.org/packages.
• Encourages community participation in contributing to Swift.