The Swift proposal that removed the ++ and –- operators (2017)
2 points · Open discussionswiftlang
swift-evolution
Markdown2015–2026
swiftlang / swift-evolution
swift-evolution
This maintains proposals for changes and user-visible enhancements to the Swift Programming Language.
105Distinct people
154Mentions
2Explicit recommenders
15.9KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
This maintains proposals for changes and user-visible enhancements to the Swift Programming Language.
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
I love Swift. Writing in it is awesome, the community is great, and it has traditionally been focused on a truly wonderful dev-focused experience. That being said, releases…
joshuawright11 used a recommendation phrase. 2 indexed comments match. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.
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Also in these discussions
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 12:01:02 AM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year154 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2015-12-03 17:04:39 UTC to 2026-07-10 11:39:51 UTC.
* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 11 | 7 | 4 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 24 | 4 | 20 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 12 | 5 | 7 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 0 | 5 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 11 | 2 | 9 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 10 | 2 | 8 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 11 | 4 | 7 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 10 | 1 | 9 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 20 | 6 | 14 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 18 | 5 | 13 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 17 | 5 | 12 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 0 | 5 |
From the project README
An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.
Read the project’s introduction
Swift Evolution
https://www.swift.org/swift-evolution/
This repository tracks the ongoing evolution of the Swift programming language, standard library, and package manager.
Goals and Release Notes
Swift Language focus areas heading into 2025
CHANGELOG
Version
Announced
Released
Swift 6.4
2026-03-18
2026-09-15
Swift 6.3
2025-10-24
2026-03-24
Swift 6.2
2025-03-08
2025-09-15
Swift 6.1
2024-10-17
2025-03-31
Swift 6.0
2024-02-22
2024-09-17
Swift 5.10
2023-08-23
2024-03-05
Swift 5.9
2023-03-06
2023-09-18
Swift 5.8
2022-11-19
2023-03-30
Swift 5.7
2022-03-29
2022-09-12
Swift 5.6
2021-11-10
2022-03-14
Swift 5.5
2021-03-12
2021-09-20
Swift 5.4
2020-11-11
2021-04-26
Swift 5.3
2020-03-25
2020-09-16
Swift 5.2
2019-09-24
2020-03-24
Swift 5.1
2019-02-18
2019-09-20
Swift 5.0
2018-09-25
2019-03-25
Swift 4.2
2018-02-28
2018-09-17
Swift 4.1
2017-10-17
2018-03-29
Swift 4.0
2017-02-16
2017-09-19
Swift 3.1
2016-12-09
2017-03-27
Swift 3.0
2016-05-06
2016-09-13
Swift 2.2
2016-01-05
2016-03-21
Read the full README on GitHubWhat Hacker News says
20 sourcesNo, it's not. Refcounting CAN be a garbage collection algorithm, but in Swift it's deterministic and done at compile time. Not to mention recently added support for non-copyable types that enforces unique ownership: https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution/blob/main/proposals...
In Crafting Self-Evident Code with D> That swift code is painful to read.
I you mean the Swift code in the article, that almost looks like Kotlin :-)
Swift requires type constraints on the original add function, but infers them for addFive.
func add<T> (x:T, y:T) -> T where T: Numeric {
x + y
}
let addFive = {(y) in add(x: 5, y: y)}
let result = addFive(3)
Edit: in Swift 3, one could write
func add<T>(x:T)(y:T) -> T where T: Numeric {
return x + y
}
and call that as
add(x: 2)(y: 3)
or, in two steps, as
let addTwo = add(2)
addTwo(3)
That functionality was removed, though. For reasoning behind that, see https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution/blob/main/proposals....
In Currying in KotlinStatically link Swift runtime libraries by default on supported platforms
4 points · Open discussion> So in Lua the "first" element has an index of 1. There's absolutely nothing wrong with this.
I’m beginning to wonder whether a language that doesn’t have indexes at all would be viable.
Swift abandoned C-style for loops (https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution/blob/main/proposals...)
It still has enumerated (https://developer.apple.com/documentation/swift/sequence/enu...()), though.
That’s a special case of zip, though, and programs could use
zip(items, 0...Int.max)
or
zip(items, 1...Int.max)
according to their preference.
Also, slices could be created using
items.subrange( skip: 3, take: 5)
instead of
items.subrange( startIndex: 3, numItems: 5)
Implementation-wise, those are identical, but conceptually, the first doesn’t use indexes
In Ask HN: Can Lua be remade to use 0-based numbering?Using C++ from Swift: The Vision Document
1 points · Open discussion> Yeah, and by representing the differences this way, Rust allows you to easily decide whether an object is used directly or is wrapped in a rc box when its used, instead of when it's defined, often not by you, and when you change your mind you don't need to change all methods or functions than mutates it and all their call sites
Changing a value type into a reference type is a pretty fundamental transformation because your local mutations now become non-local. Its not clear the Rust approach makes this any easier either, since you’d still have to update all call sites that perform mutation if suddenly one of your value types was now always wrapped in a box.
> Whatever this is called you seem to agree that the syntax is hacked and it can get hard to understand what something means
Result builders are just a way to build data types from th
Read the rest
e results of top-level expressions (hence their name). It’s not just a SwiftUI thing, they’re also used for regular expressions for example: https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution/blob/main/proposals...
> It's super easy to cause its type check to timeout, which is something I haven't seen when using Rust.
Yeah, the operator overloading design makes it too easy to construct an exponential search space.
> For instance, Swift doesn't have the orphan rule, so it's possible that 2 packages implement the same protocol for the same type, and when this happens currently there are no solutions;
There's now a warning about this: https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution/blob/main/proposals.... What other solutions can there be other than making it a hard error? It seems like an inherent drawback of typeclasses over first-class modules.
> there is this strange design decision that classes and structs should be different things and each have their own set of random limitations
structs in Swift are the same as structs in Rust, and a class is a heap-a
Read the rest
llocated reference counted box, like an Arc<Box<T>>. What are the random limitations? As far as I'm aware the behavioral differences between structs and classes are entirely explainable by the above.
> and there is SwiftUI, which hacks on the syntax itself, making statements no longer mean what they are supposed to mean
Result builders are a language feature and not part of SwiftUI: https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution/blob/main/proposals...
Just last week owning and borrowing parameters got accepted as well. https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution/blob/main/proposals...
It’s been the focus for a while especially after the concurrency work. It’s probably the final major feature before Swift 6
In Ownership in Swift: Manifesto and meta-proposal (2017)The best description I know is https://www.hackingwithswift.com/articles/258/whats-new-in-s..., which refers to a few Swift Evolution docs:
https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution/blob/main/proposals...
https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution/blob/main/proposals...
https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution/blob/main/proposals...
The first is explicitly marked as “Implementation: Swift 5.9, without no-implicit-copy constraint”, but it seems the others also ¿partly? are in.
In Ownership in Swift: Manifesto and meta-proposal (2017)Swift 5.9 dropped at WWDC, and with it came with noncopyable value types:
https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution/blob/main/proposals...
as well as a way to explicitly move types:
https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution/blob/main/proposals...
I haven’t read either in-depth, though!
In Ownership in Swift: Manifesto and meta-proposal (2017)They actually can figure that out, though [0]. I hope this can solve some of it because their deployment model is the dumbest fucking thing. I'm glad they figured out how to backport async/await, it's just impossible to use in a serious library otherwise.
[0] https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution/blob/main/proposals...
In SwiftDataC# made that change in C# 5 (2012) (https://ericlippert.com/2009/11/12/closing-over-the-loop-var...)
Swift had the problem in C-style for loops but not in “for…in” loops (https://www.timekl.com/blog/2015/11/26/variable-capture-in-g...), but got rid of it when it removed C-style for loops altogether in Swift 3 (September 2016) (https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution/blob/main/proposals...)
In Since Go 1.22, loop {for I, p:= 0, new(int); p = &I; {p = &I}} might never exitSwift-evolution/0382: Expression Macros
6 points · Open discussionShowing the 15 most recent of 20 sources. Enable JavaScript to search and browse every indexed mention.