Swift 6.4 Released

Given how much time I’ve been spending on small native apps and my swift-app-template, Swift Build becoming the default in SwiftPM is probably the bit of this release I care about most. Having the same build system on macOS, Linux and Windows is welcome, as is Subprocess finally reaching 1.0–I still have plenty of uses for Swift outside SwiftUI. Being able to await inside defer and shield cleanup from task cancellation also sounds useful for the sort of audio and background work I’ve been doing in swift-smart-prompter. The WebAssembly and Embedded Swift improvements are tempting, too. The Wasm SDK is now available directly from Swift.org, JavaScriptKit’s safe bridging is apparently up to 40 times faster than the older dynamic approach, and microcontrollers get more flexible types and error handling. None of this fixes my complaints about SwiftUI, but I would quite like to use more Swift without having to drag Apple’s frameworks along with it…