What's new in Swift: May 2026 Edition | Swift.org

What's new in Swift: May 2026 Edition

Dave Lester

Dave Lester is a Senior Product Manager at Apple and member of the Swift website workgroup.

June 3, 2026

Welcome to “What’s new in Swift,” a curated digest of releases, videos, and discussions in the Swift project and community.

To start, we’re focusing on some of the many local meetup groups sharing Swift content:

Around the world, local meetup groups and conferences bring Swift developers together, and some even predate Swift itself! Many have YouTube channels where they share videos from their events, so you can tune in remotely. Let’s highlight a few.

In May the SF Swift meetup hosted a talk by Dan Federman, Agentify Your Swift Repo, which covers building an agent for CI and review feedback. Swift Barcelona has a dedicated YouTube presence, while some groups, like the new MLX India meetup, post event playlists, including a recent talk about using MLX Swift in iOS apps that’s worth checking out. And there’s even a community-organized Swift Community Meetups YouTube channel, which hosts meetups online and is home to a series of cross-platform Swift talks.

These groups support developers in a few ways worth calling out:

Local community: they’re building local connections among Swift developers and organizations.

Room for experimentation: by being less formal and sometimes featuring works in progress, meetups create space to share ideas, get feedback, and learn from one another.

I encourage more folks to get involved in their local Swift meetup. And if your group starts publishing content and videos, please share on the Swift Forums in the Community Showcase category.

— Dave Lester

Now on to other news about Swift:

Videos to watch

Interested in using Swift for backend server development? Mohammad Azam posted a livestream recording of Introduction to Hummingbird, a walkthrough of the web framework covering installation and development basics.

Meet the Temporal Swift SDK, from Replay 2026, introduces the SDK that brings Temporal’s durable workflows (long-running processes that survive crashes, retries, and restarts without losing state) to Swift. The SDK recently reached its 1.0.0 release.

Sébastien Stormacq shares a great introduction to what’s possible with AWS Lambda and Swift, presenting Swift, Server-side, & Serverless on the DevStandup YouTube channel.

Community highlights

Swift and WebAssembly continues to be an exciting part of the project, with regular activity shared on the Swift forums, including the most recent Swift for Wasm May 2026 Updates. And if you missed it, check out the new blog post by Goodnotes about how they brought Goodnotes to the web with Swift and WebAssembly.

The 2026 Swift Mentorship Program was announced, and there’s still time until June 15, 2026, to complete the interest survey to be a mentee. Working on contributions is a rewarding way to learn. And on that note, three Swift projects were accepted for GSoC 2026.

Training an LLM in Swift, Part 1 - Matt Gallagher takes handwritten matrix multiplication for a Swift port of llm.c from 2.8 Gflop/s to 1.1 Tflop/s, a 382x speedup, using Swift 6.2’s MutableSpan and InlineArray, Relaxed.multiplyAdd from Swift Numerics, DispatchQueue.concurrentPerform, and finally AMX and Metal. A thorough tour of performance optimization in modern Swift.

Members of the community using and contributing to the VS Code Swift Extension met in May during the Swift Extension Community Office Hours, featuring demonstrations of using Kiro and more.

New package releases

Want to build an AI agent in Swift? The Swift Bedrock Library gives you a Swift library for Amazon Bedrock foundation models.

SwiftOSC is an Open Sound Control (OSC) toolkit written in Swift which recently became cross-platform, now supporting Apple platforms, Linux, and Android. It’s music to our ears! Steffan Andrews, who developed SwiftOSC, has also released other music-related Swift packages including SwiftMIDI and SwiftTimecode.

Ordo One shipped version 1.33.0 of Benchmark, a package for creating sophisticated Swift performance benchmarks for a wide variety of metrics.

Swift Evolution

The Swift project adds new language features through the Swift Evolution process. These are some of the proposals currently under review or recently accepted for a future Swift release.

Under active review:

SE-0532 Optional noncopyable improvements and generalizations - Swift’s Optional can wrap noncopyable types, but unwrapping with if let consumes the optional, leaving it unusable afterward. This proposal adds borrow() and mutate() to Optional, returning Ref? and MutableRef? to inspect or modify the payload without consuming it, and generalizes map, flatMap, and unsafelyUnwrapped to support noncopyable wrapped types.

Recently accepted:

SE-0528 Continuation Safe and Performant Async Continuations - When bridging callback-based APIs to Swift’s structured concurrency,...