An Elements Update, aka 8.3.95

Hi everyone.

Last week, we shipped Elements 8.3.95, the second and final interim update for 8.3. This version has been a great release from the get-go, and .95 adds an incredible amount of polish, minor improvements and bug fixes. It also includes a whole bunch of changes and new features for Fire, as well as some of the work we have been doing towards Swift 3.0.

Of course the majority of new stuff we've been working on has been going into our Elements 8.4 branch, which has been available as pre-release for a while now, and recently been promoted from Alpha to Beta, about a month back. Elements 8.4 is coming together to be an amazing milestone release, and you should really check out the betas — we shipped a new one on Friday that is also a full superset of all the fixes in 8.3.95.

The current 8.4 betas also include the majority of our Swift 3.0 work. We're mostly done with Swift 3.0 compliance on the compiler level, and next week will bring the last remaining big change, the "Grand Rename", which we have implemented in a way that allows you the new "swiftier" names without completely breaking backwards-compatibility (essentially, both the old, "real" Objective-C names and the new swiftier names of Cocoa APIs will be available; Oxygene and C# will continue to prefer the old names, while Swift/Silver will suggest the new names by default, in things such as Code Completion). You can keep up on our progress on Swift 3.x and 4.0 in general, here.

8.4 also includes the new Island back-end, many many improvements and enhancements, as well as a new language front-end which we have not (yet) talked about publicly: "Iodine".

So, there's a lot to be excited about this week!

If you're on the stable track, for production use, or if you are evaluating or using the free Silver edition, get 8.3.95.2031 here (free download). To check out the latest and live on the bleeding edge, grab 8.4.96.2033 here (login needed).

Enjoy!