Swift 3.0 developer previews are coming soon, but the full update won’t launch at WWDC

Swift 3.0 is coming, and the first developer previews will be out later this week.

In a blog post, the Swift team notes it will create the first developer preview of Swift 3.0 on May 12, and release it 4-6 weeks later. The release cycle for developer previews will be “irregular,” but the Swift team is trying to stick to a 4-6 week cadence.

The Swift GitHub repo will also have three main branches: main, Swift 3.0 preview and Swift 3.0. All development will happen in the Master branch, while developer preview may have multiple offshoot branches for everything that’s being proposed. The Swift 3.0 branch should be considered a more stable developer preview, which is being tagged as the “final release branch” in Swift 3.0’s evolution.

Swift 3.0 is also not source-compatible with Swift 2.2, as it contains fundamental language changes and tweaks to the Swift Standard Library.

The silver lining in that is Swift 3.0 will be the first with the Swift Package Manager, which lends itself to cross-platform applications. The Package Manager will be available for Darwin and Linux, and Swift 3.0 is the first to contain the Core Libraries for Linux.

As you may have guessed by the timing of developer previews, Swift 3.0 will not be launching at WWDC. The Swift teams ays it will launch later this year along with an updated version of Xcode.