Apple has released Swift 5.5, the latest version of its open-source programming language for building apps on iOS, macOS and other platforms.

Apple announced Swift 5.5 in June at its annual developer conference WWDC with headline features including ‘Swift Concurrency‘ for asynchronous and concurrent programming, improved package management and distribution, and standard library packages.

One notable change was that developers can now grab packages from a search screen in Xcode, Apple’s IDE or integrated development environment. So-called “package collections“, or selected lists of packages, make it easier to distribute and consume collections of packages for specific uses.

Tiobe, which regularly publishes a list of the most popular languages, has argued that Swift adoption was hampered by the availability of languages that supported cross-platform mobile development.

Tiobe placed Swift as the 15th most popular language in September 2021, down from 12th a year ago. Developer analyst firm RedMonk puts Swift at 11th in July. According to RedMonk, Swift was the fastest-growing language in the past decade, but the pace of its growth has been matched by TypeScript, Microsoft’s superset of JavaScript.