In this annual post, the Swift Server WorkGroup (SSWG) reflects on the community, ecosystem-wide accomplishments and the workgroup’s focus areas for the year ahead. Since our previous update, Swift on the Server has continued to grow in many ways. Let’s start with a look at the progress made in 2023, then look ahead and next steps for 2024. 2023 in Review Server Community Survey For the first time ever, the SSWG ran a developer community survey aimed at collecting feedback and information about the shape and breadth of the Swift server ecosystem. We received a great response, and we’d like to ..read more

Swift is well-suited for creating user interfaces thanks to the clean syntax, static typing, and special features making code easier to write. Result builders, combined with Swift’s closure expression syntax, can significantly enhance code readability. Adwaita for Swift leverages these Swift features to provide an intuitive interface for developing applications for the GNOME platform. GNOME is a popular, open source desktop environment for Linux, known for its emphasis on simplicity and accessibility. It offers an intuitive user interface, with a vast app ecosystem built using its modern Adwai ..read more

In the world of software development, the old adage “make it work, make it right, make it fast” serves as a guiding principle for creating robust, efficient applications. This journey starts with ensuring that our code functions as intended, a task where unit and integration testing have proven indispensable. However, ensuring functionality is only part of the equation. The true measure of an application’s excellence extends into its performance - how fast and efficiently it operates under various conditions. Herein lies the critical but often overlooked third step: making it fast. In the real ..read more

I’m excited to share swift-playdate-examples, a technical demonstration of using Swift to build games for Playdate, a handheld game system by Panic. Why Swift? Swift is widely known as the modern language for app development on Apple devices. However, over the course of its first decade, it has grown into a versatile, multi-platform language targeting use cases where you’d otherwise find C or C++. Personally, I have come to appreciate Swift’s emphasis on memory safety and great ergonomics, and want these traits for embedded systems where reliability and security are critically important. But e ..read more

Parameter packs, introduced in Swift 5.9, make it possible to write generics that abstract over the number of arguments. This eliminates the need to have overloaded copies of the same generic function for one argument, two arguments, three arguments, and so on. With Swift 6.0, pack iteration makes it easier than ever to work with parameter packs. This post will show you how to make the best use of pack iteration. Parameter Packs Recap First, let’s review parameter packs. Consider the following code: let areEqual = (1, true, "hello") == (1, 2.0, false) print(areEqual) // false The above code ..read more

Swift was designed to be safe by default, preventing entire categories of programming mistakes at compile time. Sources of undefined behavior in C-based languages, such as using variables before they’re initialized or a use-after-free, are defined away in Swift. An increasingly important source of undefined behavior is concurrent code that inadvertently accesses memory from one thread at the same time that another thread is writing to the same memory. This kind of unsafety is called a data race, and data races make concurrent programs exceptionally difficult to write correctly. Swift solves th ..read more

We’re happy to announce that Swift will once again be joining Google Summer of Code 2024! Summer of Code is an annual program, organized by Google, which provides hands-on experience for newcomers contributing to open source projects. Participants usually are students, but do not have to be. Swift has been participating in Summer of Code since 2018, and every year we’ve had successful projects, helping the Swift project among various aspects including the compiler, runtime, and general package and tooling ecosystem. If you’re curious, here are the two most recent project summaries for 2022 and ..read more

The Swift programming language has a lot of potential to be used for machine learning research because it combines the ease of use and high-level syntax of a language like Python with the speed of a compiled language like C++. MLX is an array framework for machine learning research on Apple silicon. MLX is intended for research and not for production deployment of models in apps. MLX Swift expands MLX to the Swift language, making experimentation on Apple silicon easier for ML researchers. As part of this release we are including: A comprehensive Swift API for MLX core Higher level neural net ..read more

The Swift project regularly participates in Google Summer of Code in order to help people new to the open source ecosystem dip their toes in contributing to Swift and its growing ecosystem. During the 2023 edition of the program, we ran three projects, all of which completed their assigned projects successfully. The projects in this edition were: Swift Memcache Library Incremental Parsing in SwiftParser Key Path Inference and Diagnostic Improvements We’d like to extend our sincere thanks to the participants and mentors who poured their time and passion into these projects, and use this post ..read more

We’re happy to announce the stable 1.0 release of Swift OpenAPI Generator! OpenAPI is an open standard for describing the behavior of HTTP services with a rich ecosystem of tooling. One thing OpenAPI is particularly known for is tooling to generate interactive documentation. But the core motivation of OpenAPI is code-generation, which allows adopters to use an API-first approach to server development and, because many existing services document their API in this format, allows client developers to generate type-safe, idiomatic to call these APIs. Many real-world APIs have hundreds of operation ..read more