The Future of Foundation

Tony Parker manages teams at Apple working on Foundation, Swift packages, and the Swift Standard Library.

The Foundation framework is used in nearly all Swift projects. It provides both a base layer of functionality for fundamentals like strings, collections, and dates, as well as setting conventions for writing great Swift code.

Today, we have some exciting announcements for the future of Foundation.

Going Open

When Swift began life as an open source project, we wanted to open not just the language itself, but the ecosystem around it. Foundation has been instrumental in the success of decades of software and has been an integral part of the Swift developer experience from the beginning, and we knew it had to be included in the open source offering.

The swift-corelibs-foundation project helped launch the open source Swift version of Foundation in 2016, wrapping a Swift layer around the preexisting, open source C implementation of Foundation.

In the intervening years, Swift has grown both technologically (e.g. ABI stability), as well as socially, attracting a diverse community of participants bound together by their interest in Swift.

With that growth, the time has come to reevaluate the strategy of an open source Foundation.

Going Further

Today, we are announcing a new open source Foundation project, written in Swift, for Swift.

This achieves a number of technical goals:

And this also achieves an important community goal:

Going Together

We’re excited to start discussing these plans with everyone on the Swift forums. The project itself will launch on GitHub in 2023.