Is Anyone Else Excited by Swift’s Progress as a Language? -- Fatbobman's Swift Weekly #141

Fatbobman's Swift Weekly

SubscribeSign in

Fatbobman's Swift Weekly #141<br>Is Anyone Else Excited by Swift’s Progress as a Language?

Fatbobman(东坡肘子)<br>Jun 22, 2026

Share

Photo by Guille Álvarez on Unsplash<br>Is Anyone Else Excited by Swift’s Progress as a Language?

Read on web →<br>Last week, a Reddit post titled “Is anyone else excited by Swift progress as the language?⁠” sparked a lively discussion. At WWDC 2026, Apple made it clear that Swift is now being used in key WebKit components, the QUIC networking stack, font rendering, drivers, and firmware—and, as the original poster claimed, it has started making its way into the core operating system kernel beginning with the 27 releases. The original poster saw this as Apple finally delivering on the promise it made in 2014 when it introduced Swift as a “high-level systems programming language.” The discussion soon expanded beyond whether that promise had been fulfilled to topics such as cross-platform support, language governance, the tooling experience, and whether Swift is becoming too large and ambitious.<br>Despite its remaining shortcomings, I still appreciate the progress Swift has made over the years. This week’s recommendations happen to offer several different perspectives on that progress: Swift 6.4 continues to fill in practical gaps in the concurrency model; KernelKit reveals the infrastructure Apple is laying for Swift in the kernel; and SwiftOS demonstrates Embedded Swift taking on an entire operating system and real-world service workloads. Swift’s progress is no longer measured only by the number of language features it has gained, but also by the growing range of work it can handle—and many of those use cases are no longer merely experimental.<br>Personally, since Swift 6, I have tried to adopt new language features wherever possible. For new projects, I have already raised the minimum required Swift compiler version to 6.2, and as my understanding deepens, I may raise it further. Some features involving concurrency, ownership, and isolation can feel awkward at first. Once their design goals become clear, however, they often turn out not to increase cognitive load, but to reduce it: correctness that once depended on conventions, comments, and developer experience can now be expressed as constraints the compiler is able to verify. The result is code that is easier to reason about, clearer in intent, and able to prevent many safety issues before it ever runs.<br>In the age of AI, a language’s ergonomic advantages may no longer determine adoption as decisively as they once did. As the cost of generating code falls, the real differentiators are more likely to be the ecosystem, tooling, available deployment targets, and whether the compiler can provide consistently reliable feedback. But that does not make language design less important—it simply changes how its value appears. As AI participates in writing more of our code, strong type systems, explicit ownership semantics, and strict concurrency checking become machine-verifiable guardrails. AI can produce code faster; the language and compiler help us determine which of that code deserves to be trusted.<br>Swift has always occupied a somewhat contradictory position. The Apple ecosystem gives it a large, stable field of application, yet it has also caused the language to be seen for years as something that “belongs only to Apple.” That ecosystem is both the hardest boundary for Swift to cross as it expands outward and the solid foundation that ensures continued investment, steady evolution, and protection from fading into irrelevance. Today, developments such as the official Android SDK, the WebAssembly SDK, and the Windows Working Group suggest that this boundary is gradually moving outward. Of course, tooling, package ecosystems, and the overall developer experience on non-Apple platforms still have a long way to go.<br>Does Swift still make me feel excited? Perhaps not exactly. But I genuinely enjoy where the language is today. Compared with the grand vision of a decade ago, I prefer the current pace: turning those promises into engineering reality, one step at a time.<br>Previous Issue｜Newsletter Archive

📢 Sponsor Fatbobman’s Swift Weekly

Promote your product to Swift & iOS developers across:<br>- Blog: 50,000 + monthly visitors<br>- Newsletter: 4,000 + subscribers, 53 % open rate<br>Perfect for developer tools, courses, and services.<br>📢 View Sponsorship Options<br>Enjoyed this issue? Buy me a coffee ☕️

Original

From Size Class to Available Space: Is horizontalSizeClass Still Reliable?

Starting with WWDC 26, iPhone apps mirrored to a Mac through iPhone Mirroring will support freely resizable windows. At the same time, iPhone-only apps running on iPad will also enter a variable-size environment. The impact of this update goes far beyond simply allowing iPhone apps to resize. It is changing how many developers have long...