What's new in Swift: February 2026 Edition

Karen Chu

Dave Lester

March 2, 2026

Welcome to this edition of “What’s New in Swift,” where we share interesting projects and updates in the Swift community that deserve visibility to a broader audience.

FOSDEM is the largest open source conference in the world, and this year Swift was featured in talks across multiple tracks and a dedicated pre-conference event. Here’s a report from the Swift community:

Hey there! Karen Chu here. 👋 I help grow and support the Swift open source community, and one of my favorite things has been increasing Swift’s participation in open source events.

As a follow-up to Swift’s presence at FOSDEM last year, this year we expanded our approach by running our own Pre-FOSDEM fringe event, which included 11 talks across multiple platforms, in addition to four Swift talks across various devroom tracks.

Though it was my first year at FOSDEM, it was delightful to meet several people who attended the Swift devroom last year and also came through again this year. With the vast array of attendee backgrounds (I met recent grads, former Swift mentees, Swift workgroup members, folks from the Swift Core Team, and more) and talks covering different platforms (embedded, server, BSD, Android, and more), that weekend showed me just how much momentum Swift has gained as a general purpose language that can benefit everyone.

I wanted to highlight Simon Leeb’s talk, Swift in the Browser with ElementaryUI, as a popular talk from the event which showed how to run Swift applications natively in the browser with WebAssembly.

FOSDEM may be over (for now), but I’m already excited about how the Swift community will show up next year!

To catch up on all the talks at the Pre-FOSDEM event, check out the YouTube playlist.

Now on to other news about Swift:

New package releases

Originally developed for searching financial databases for strings like stock tickers, FuzzyMatch brings high-performance fuzzy string matching to Swift.
Now you can expose GraphQL APIs in your applications with new Vapor and Hummingbird packages.
Using Microsoft SQL Server? SQLClient-Swift is a native client for iOS, macOS, and Linux that’s built using modern Swift concurrency.
Developers now have more options to create terminal-based Swift applications with TuiKit, a declarative, SwiftUI-like framework for building Terminal User Interfaces. TuiKit joins Noora, which provides themeable components for CLIs.

Lastly, Swift System Metrics 1.0 was announced, making the collection of process-level metrics easy.

Videos to watch

Interested in writing Swift using agents? At Swift Barcelona, a talk on Building Agentic Apps with MCP in Swift demonstrated several open source tools. And if you’re an Xcode user, check out a recent code-along covering coding intelligence in Xcode 26.
Introducing the Swift SDK for Android covered the current state of Swift on Android, how to call Java and Kotlin APIs from Swift, UI strategies, and what’s actively being worked on.
SwiftCrossUI: Swift apps, everywhere presented a UI solution for Swift applications that run on Android, Linux, and Windows, using native UI components on each platform. The project also recently published a development update in video form, covering contributions and recent changes.
Ever wanted to control microcontrollers in Swift? CoreAVR + ArduinoKit: Swift on the Arduino, the Swift way introduces ArduinoKit, which acts as the Arduino standard library for Swift, and CoreAVR, a hardware abstraction layer for AVR microcontrollers written in Swift.

Community highlights

Swift is participating in Google Summer of Code 2026! 🎉 A recent forums post announced the process and outlined key dates to learn more. This is a great opportunity if you’re a student interested in contributing to Swift!
A community member recently blogged about their experience profiling Swift applications on Windows and macOS with Tracy, covering how to visualize and analyze their application performance.

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-0514 Hashable Conformance for Dictionary.Keys, CollectionOfOne and EmptyCollection - Three standard library collection types can’t currently be used in sets or as dictionary keys. This proposal adds Hashable conformance to all three, for consistency with the rest of the standard library.
SE-0513 API to get the path to the current executable - There’s currently no portable, reliable way to get the path to the currently running executable in Swift. This proposal adds CommandLine.executablePath, a new property in the standard library that provides a consistent way to get this value across all platforms Swift supports.

Recently accepted:

SE-0506 Advanced Observation Tracking - @Observable types automatically track when their properties change. However, advanced use cases like developing middleware infrastructure or widget systems require more control and features. This proposal adds options to the existing withObservationTracking to control when/which changes are observed, and a continuous variant that re-observes automatically after coalesced events.
SE-0502 Exclude private initialized properties from memberwise initializer - When you define a struct in Swift, the compiler automatically generates an initializer that takes each property as an argument. Currently, adding a private property with a default value to a struct forces that auto-generated initializer to become private, which breaks callers outside of the type. This proposal fixes that behavior.

Have any suggestions for a future issue? Drop them in the Community Showcase on the Swift Forums. See you next time!

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