Swift Foundation 2024 Update

1 min read

The Swift-Foundation workgroup posted an update for 2024:

  • Swift-Foundation is included with Swift 6.0: a fast, Swift-native Foundation for all users on Linux, Windows, and other platforms.
  • contributing to Swift-Foundation is easier. It is now possible to build swift-foundation and swift-corelibs-foundation without building the entire Swift toolchain, thanks to SwiftPM support.

They also announced the forward direction:

More Swift initiative

...continue the trend of moving Foundation's implementation away from C-based languages and toward Swift. As part of this move, we'll be focusing Swift-Foundation on offering the core functionalities of Foundation.framework.

Performance initiative

We will be developing additional benchmarks for Foundation, with a focus on real-world use cases to ensure performance continues to improve over time

Papercuts initiative

Finally, we want to encourage more community participation in Swift-Foundation through a focus on removing as many "papercuts" as possible.

Papercuts are small annoyances that detract from the overall experience and deter contributors, especially newcomers to Swift. With a significant portion of Foundation now implemented in Swift, shared across platforms and available as open source, we see a clear opportunity for the community to contribute.

I plan to keep an eye on this, and possibly contribute.

Read the full update