Swift & SwiftUI 2022: Concurrency, Custom Layouts, and New Charts

New Swift Features

At WWDC 2022 Apple introduced a major iteration of Swift, emphasizing concurrency support, actor‑based safety, and distributed actors that can communicate across processes and devices.

Ben Cohen, Apple’s chief engineer, explained that Swift now allows code with Swift Concurrency to run on all macOS versions released in the past three years, simplifying parallel execution.

The actor model provides thread‑safe, concurrent code isolation, preventing accidental shared‑state bugs. Distributed actors add a distributed keyword enabling remote method calls between separate processes or devices.

Apple also released a new source package that adds concurrency to the Swift sequence protocol, including a Zip algorithm and async methods for compressing two asynchronous sequences.

Actors communicate using the classic async/await pattern.

SwiftUI Custom Layout

SwiftUI, Apple’s declarative UI framework, received a richer set of layout options. A new Grid container helps developers build multidimensional and dynamic layouts, and developers can now create fully custom containers.

SwiftUI also introduces Swift Charts, a charting toolkit that supports bar and line charts matching the app’s style. Example code:

Chart(datapoints) { datapoint
    BarMark(
        x: .value("X-Axis-Label", datapoint.valueX),
        y: .value("Y-Axis-Label", datapoint.valueY)
    )
}
Chart(datapoints) { datapoint
    LineMark(
        x: .value("X-Axis-Label", datapoint.valueX),
        y: .value("Y-Axis-Label", datapoint.valueY)
    )
    .foregroundStyle(by: .value("Category", task.category))
}

Additional preview and visualization tools make data easier to understand for both developers and users.

Swift’s string handling was also upgraded: built‑in regular expression support is now part of the language, and the compiler validates regex correctness automatically.

For more details on SwiftUI’s new features, visit the Apple Developer channel: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2022/10052/