Swift was introduced to the world in 2014 and has rapidly evolved since then, eventually being released as an open source project in late 2015. Swift has been one of the fastest-growing programming languages in history, by a variety of metrics, and is worth serious consideration regardless of your level of programming experience or the size and age of your project’s code.

Swift was designed to be a complete replacement for Objective-C, the language used for all iOS and Mac OS development prior to Swift’s release. Swift is ideal for new projects; additionally, because you can easily use Swift and Objective-C in the same project, you can incrementally convert your existing Objective-C code to Swift.

Swift has truly been released into the open: the conceptualization, discussion, and development of new language features, direction decisions, and changes to the features all take place on open mailing lists, with the wider community of Swift users. This is important, because it means that the direction of the language is in the hands of users and not the exclusive domain of a central planning group.

In this report, we’re going to look at Swift 3, released in September 2016, and the first significant release from the open source Swift project. Specifically, we’re going to look at three facets of Swift 3 pro‐ gramming and the ecosystem around its use.