Swift introduces new concurrency features and async/await capabilities

New developments in the Swift programming language are introducing structured concurrency features, including continuations, tasks, and cancellation mechanisms. These updates, part of the evolution toward async/await, aim to provide developers with more robust tools for asynchronous programming.

The introduction of APIs such as AsyncSequence and AsyncStream presents potential functional overlap with Apple’s Combine framework. While Combine has traditionally served as the primary reactive programming framework for building data pipelines, the new built-in language features allow for similar tasks—such as network calls and JSON decoding—to be implemented using simpler, more straightforward async/await syntax.