Apple Xcode 13 supports teams, Swift concurrency

Xcode 13, the latest version of Apple’s integrated development environment, is now available in beta, highlighted by team development capabilities and alignment with the company’s new Xcode Cloud cloud-based continuous development and continuous delivery platform.

Xcode 13, downloadable from developer.apple.com, provides team development features for working with Xcode Cloud, GitHub, Bitbucket, and GitLab. Support is offered for Xcode Cloud CI/CD as well as for Git pull requests. With Xcode 13, developers can see teammates’ comments within code, along with the name and avatar of the reviewer, and compare two versions of code files. Apps are code-signed via an Apple-hosted certificate management service to ease App Store submissions.

Additional capabilities cited in Xcode 13 beta release notes include:

• Native support for concurrent programming with the Swift language and Swift package collections. Swift 5.5 natively supports concurrent programming using async/await and actors. Also in support of Swift concurrency, the Apple Clang compiler now can warn if a call completion handler is called more than once or if an execution path does not have a completion handler call.
• Developers can create and merge pull requests using Xcode source control features when signed into a GitHub or Bitbucket Server account.
• SDKs are included for iOS 15, iPadOS 15, MacOS Monterey, tvOS 15, and watchOS 8.
• The cktool can be used on the command line to interact with the CloudKit database.
• Crash reports are featured with more filtering capabilities and more statistics.
• Vim key bindings are introduced to emulate a Vim experience in the source editor combined with existing editor functionality.
• The CPU counters template is now more reliable and performant.
• The build system now emits a warning when a script phase or a custom build rule declares an input dependency that is not part of a build input and is not declared as an output dependency of any other task in a build.
• Provisioning apps for the TestFlight beta test platform is supported on the Mac.
• TextureConverter can be used on the command line to compress textures to all Metal compressed texture formats.
• A -fobjc-constant-literals flag in the Clang compiler lets developers declare global constant literals and perform optimizations for other literals supported in Objective-C.
• Xcode’s Core ML model editor now supports the new Core ML package format.