What's new in Swift: August 2026 Edition

Simon Leeb Simon Leeb
Dave Lester Dave Lester

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

Here’s an update from guest contributor Simon Leeb on Swift’s progress as a language for web scenarios:

Hi, Simon here! I am the creator of the elementary-swift project, a collection of packages born from a simple wish: I want to build web UIs in Swift and ultimately help Swift become a first-class choice for the web.

This journey began after I started using Swift for backend services. The web frontend, however, still lived in a separate ecosystem, and I really wanted it to feel as ergonomic, safe, and efficient as the Swift I was writing everywhere else.

That led to the creation of Elementary: a modern and efficient HTML rendering library with a familiar declarative API, built for the web. It integrates easily with frameworks like Vapor and Hummingbird, and has become a practical option for server-rendered web UIs.

Around that same time, years of community work in the swift-wasm project made compiling Swift to WebAssembly increasingly viable, while Embedded Swift was taking its first experimental steps. This made me wonder: “How hard can it be to use Embedded Swift and build a state-driven web UI framework that produces tiny WebAssembly binaries?” Turns out: quite hard, actually!

But it was too late. Despite my better judgment, I was in the middle of creating what is now known as ElementaryUI. Where Elementary renders HTML on the server, ElementaryUI runs in the browser itself. You can watch my talk at Swift@FOSDEM 2026 if you want to know more about the why, what, and how.

To showcase where the project is heading, I recently posted a small Full-Stack Swift on Cloudflare demo. It features Swift in the browser communicating with a Swift backend on an edge worker through shared message types. I hope it gives people a concrete sense of how much the core technologies and the surrounding tooling have advanced.

ElementaryUI is still young, with plenty left to build. Visit elementary.codes to try it, share feedback, contribute, or sponsor its development. Let’s work together and make Swift a first-class choice for the web!

Now on to other news about Swift:

Videos to watch

  • Saleem Abdulrasool joined the Empower Apps podcast to discuss Swift on Windows, server-side Swift, SwiftWin32, Swift’s C++ interop, and how to get started.
  • Building memory-safe software? Write security-sensitive code in Swift covers how Swift guarantees safety across bounds, lifetimes, types, initialization, and concurrency, with primitives like Span and non-copyable types, plus how to audit unsafe code with strict memory safety and incrementally migrate existing C modules.
  • Two short videos about running Embedded Swift on Raspberry Pi Pico: a video on getting started on macOS called Let it blink! and Fun with traffic lights in 60 seconds.

Community highlights

New package releases

  • Write an interface once with SwiftTUI using a declarative, state-driven syntax, then ship it as a terminal app, as a native macOS or iOS app, as an Android app, or as a WASI build for the browser.
  • Tired of hand-writing RawRepresentable and LosslessStringConvertible conformances? lexic generates them for you via macros, and runs the same on Linux as on Apple platforms.
  • StructuredQueries, Point-Free’s SQLite query builder, now has fully type-safe support for JSON and JSONB columns, including a json_each table function, so nested data can be queried and updated by key path without leaving Swift’s type system.

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:

  • ST-0029 Include additional issue metadata in event stream - Today, Swift Testing’s JSON event stream reports only bare-bones details when an issue occurs, making it hard to tell a thrown error apart from a manual Issue.record call. This proposal adds structured fields, including error, confirmationMiscount, exceededTimeLimit, and expression, so tools like Xcode and VS Code can show richer, more specific failure information.

Recently accepted:

  • SE-0544 Mutation and consumption in non-copyable type deinits - Non-copyable types that manage a resource, like a file handle or buffer, often need to run the same cleanup logic in their deinit that they use elsewhere, but until now self inside a deinit could only be borrowed, not mutated or consumed. This proposal lets a deinit mutate or consume its own stored properties directly, so existing cleanup methods can be reused instead of duplicated.
  • ST-0028 Revise Swift Testing’s Attachment/Encodable interop - Swift Testing lets you attach extra data, like a screenshot or JSON snapshot, to a test for inspecting after a failure, but attaching custom types previously required extra setup code and offered no way to choose the encoding format. This proposal adds new Attachment initializers that let you attach Encodable or NSSecureCoding values directly, picking the format or supplying your own encoder.

Recently accepted with modifications:

  • SE-0536 Package Registry Search - To use a package from a registry today, you already have to know its exact identifier, since there’s no standard way to discover packages within a registry the way other package ecosystems allow. This proposal adds an optional /search endpoint to the registry specification and a swift package-registry search subcommand, letting you find packages by name, scope, author, and other criteria, with support for qualifiers like author:"Mona Lisa Octocat" and searches that span every configured registry at once.
  • SE-0516 Iterable - Looping over a collection in Swift traditionally means copying out one element at a time, which doesn’t work for newer types that can’t be copied, like Span and InlineArray. This proposal introduces Iterable, a new way to loop over data without copying, and was renamed from BorrowingSequence and given support for typed throws before acceptance.
  • ST-0026 TaskLocal test trait - Task-local values are like settings, such as a feature flag, that apply only within a single task. Overriding one in a test previously meant writing a custom trait from scratch, but this proposal adds a .taskLocal(_:_:) trait that does it in one line, like @Suite(.taskLocal(FeatureFlags.$isEnabled, true)).

Authors

Simon Leeb Simon Leeb
Simon is a software developer, co-founder and CTO of a logistics software company, and a part-time open-source developer in the Swift ecosystem.
Dave Lester Dave Lester
Dave Lester is a Senior Product Manager at Apple and member of the Swift website workgroup.

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