• 1 Background
  • 1.1 Swift TLDR
  • 1.2 What Is ABI Stability and Dynamic Linking
  • 1.3 Swift’s Stable ABI
  • 1.4 Resilience and Library Evolution
• 2 Details
  • 2.1 Resilient Type Layout
  • 2.2 Polymorphic Generics
  • 2.3 Reabstraction
  • 2.4 Materialization
  • 2.5 Ownership
  • 2.6 Opting Out of Resilience
  • 2.7 Esoterica

For those who don’t follow Swift’s development, ABI stability has been one of its most ambitious projects and possibly it’s defining feature, and it finally shipped in Swift 5. The result is something I find endlessly fascinating, because I think Swift has pushed the notion of ABI stability farther than any language without much compromise.

So I decided to write up a bunch of the interesting high-level details of Swift’s ABI. This is not a complete reference for Swift’s ABI, but rather an abstract look at its implementation strategy. If you really want to know exactly how it allocates registers or mangles names, look somewhere else.

Also for context on why I’m writing this, I’m just naturally inclined to compare the design of Swift to Rust, because those are the two languages I have helped develop. Also some folks like to complain that Rust doesn’t bother with ABI stability, and I think looking at how Swift does helps elucidate why that is…

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