End of Source-breaking Changes for Swift 3
The Swift team at Apple has reflected on this and decided what it “means” for Swift 3 to be source compatible with Swift 4 and later releases going forward. Our goal is to allow app developers to combine a mix of Swift modules (e.g., SwiftPM packages), where each module is known to compile with a specific version of the language (module A works with Swift 3, module B works with Swift 3.1, etc.), then combine those modules into a single binary. The key feature is that a module can be migrated from Swift 3 to 3.1 to 4 (and beyond) independently of its dependencies.
While the exact details of how we will accomplish this feat are still being discussed, here is a sketch of how this will likely work in the Swift 4 timeframe. The key enabler is a new compiler flag that indicates the language version to compile for (e.g., similar to the clang -std=c99 flag). The compiler flag will be provided by the build system you are using (e.g., Xcode, SwiftPM, etc.) on a per-module basis[…]
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The great thing about this approach is that a single Swift 4 compiler is building all of the sources in an application. This allows us to roll out this approach before achieving full ABI stability — something that will be a goal for Swift 4, but is impractical to achieve for a Swift 3.x release. It also provides us a general framework in the future for handling source compatibility as Swift evolves.
See also: Swift Programming Language Evolution: Proposal Status (via Jacob Bandes-Storch).
