How Reddit Rewrote Their iOS App to Improve Performance, Modularity, and Testing
Reddit has been hard at work in the last year to improve the performance of their iOS app while also making it suitable for faster iteration cycles, improved test coverage, and better extensibility. All of this was made possible by evolving the app original MVC architecture into a Model-View-Presenter (MVP) architecture.
Swift 4.2 Hits the Road
One year after the release of Swift 4, Swift 4.2 is now official. It brings a number of improvements to the language and the standard library, including better generics, Hashable protocol, and random number generation. Additionally, writes Swift maintainer Ted Kremenek, Swift 4 delivers faster compile times and improves the debugging experience.
Alexa Smart Home Skills Gain Flexibility with New API
The latest update to Amazon Smart Home Skill API, available as a preview, introduces new capabilities that can be used as building blocks to model device settings or features. Additionally, Smart Home skills have gained greater flexibility by enabling the use of custom intents.
Swift 5 Enters Latest Development Stage to Release
After officially delivering Swift 4.2, the Swift team is now focusing on Swift 5 by kicking off the final phase of its release process. Planned to be released early 2019, Swift 5 aims to bring ABI stability to the language while preserving source compatibility.
Kotlin 1.3 Introduces Stable Coroutines, Contracts, and More
At KotlinConf 2018 in Amsterdam, Netherlands, JetBrains announced Kotlin 1.3 RC, introducing new language features such as stable coroutines, contracts, inline classes, and more. At KotlinConf, Google and JetBrains also announced their joint effort to establish the Kotlin Foundation.