Status update for Swift, Ruby and Crystal September 2025

Exercism
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I thought I might provide an update for what is currently going on around my development over this Summer and Fall. This year is quite different from other years, in that I this year studied over the Summer. While trying to combine some kind of vacation with full time studies, lead to that I didnt have much time to other things (like Exercism). I am not starting the new term but I have some projects going still.

Later this Fall more specifically November I will start working as a teacher assistant at my University. This means that I will have more time for hands on teaching and this in turn will mean that my time for Exercism will be extremely limited.

Swift

In June we launched the Swift 6 update, this is likely one of the single largest update I have launched. I am a sole maintainer and had a bit of limited development time which lead to some errors in the follow up release. Most of this have been solved by the community which I am very grateful for, and an extra shot out to @Sencudra for adding some new exercises and helping out on speeding up the test runner.

I am thinking of updating the test runner to Swift 6.2 in early October (hopefully) and maybe changing to a new build system. But also I am planing to depart as maintainer of Swift in the beginning of November. And in early September (around now) will I switch over the track to closing prs and referring to the forum instead.

Ruby

I started for around 6 months ago I started the work on a generator. I worked on the Swift 6 update which took the focus from this but I have now restarted this work. The generator will allow us to template exercise and then generate the test file from problem spec. This means the exercises will be easier to keep updated. It also reduces errors in them. I have templates I think around 30% of exercises and have merged in around 10 exercises. This in turn means that all tests will be updated but the main goal is to not change structure of the tests if absolutely not needed.

I will also later work on the hash concept and exercise.

Crystal

I am planing an update around mid this fall with a Crystal update and some syncs and some new content. I have not started on this yet so can’t speak much yet but it is planned.

5 Likes
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@Meatball Thanks a lot for the kind words, for your contributions and for your detailed feedback on my PRs. I’m excited to keep contributing to the Swift track. Actually, 2 more PRs are waiting their time — one to make the swift-runner “even more” faster and another with a refactor to improve stability and verbosity of the test runner :grinning: Sadly, I couldn’t figure out yet how to speed up the test-runner build itself easily, unless we drop swift-syntax and build something custom.

Long story short… if this kind of help is useful, I’d be glad to support you and take on some of the Swift track work: even the update to swift 6.2. And of course, I won’t forget about the exercises — there are still tons of them to add. I’ve got plenty of free time until Spring 2026.

cc: @iHiD

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Do you have one ready for perfect-numbers? I noticed that the tests are out of sync with the problem spec data. (Just 4 tests in the test file vs. 13 in the problem spec.)

I’d be willing to write one, if not.

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I have not done that one yet, so fi you want you can do it.