The first Swift  3 developer preview will drop this week on 12 May 2016. Big news for everyone getting ready to start migrating.

Posted on the Swift.org blog:

Swift 3.0 is a major release that is not source-compatible with Swift 2.2. It contains fundamental changes to the language and Swift Standard Library. A comprehensive list of implemented changes for Swift 3.0 can be found on the Swift evolution site.

Swift 3.0 is also the first release to include the Swift Package Manager. While the Swift Package Manager is still early in its development, it supports the development and distribution of cross-platform Swift packages. The Swift Package Manager will be available on both Darwin and Linux.

For Linux, Swift 3 will also be the first release to contain the Swift Core Libraries.

Developer previews will start rolling out soon, with an expected released date for Swift 3.0 in late 2016-ish. If you haven’t been using Xcode’s new toolchain selection feature yet, you’ll find it under the main Xcode menu:

Although the Swift team has been putting out snapshots every few weeks, previews will arrive less often — between 4 and 6 weeks per release. “They will be partially driven by the volume of change going into master and how much time is needed to stabilize a developer preview branch.”

Further details about contributions, pull requests, and affected repositories are at the Swift.org blog post.