Recently announced on the swift-evolution mailing list, the Swift ABI Stability Manifesto aims to be a compilation of all concerns that need to be addressed before Swift’s ABI can be declared stable.
The goal of ABI stability has two main parts, writes Apple engineer Michael Ilseman , author of the document:
In particular, Ilseman identifies six areas where work needs to be done:
ABI stability is one of the top-priority features planned for Swift 4 and is crucial for third-party framework developers. As InfoQ reported , ABI stability did not make it into Swift 3 due to the impossibility of defining some aspects of the language that needed to be defined before locking down the ABI.
