• ICYMI: Memory Safety, Ecosystem Talks, and Java Interoperability at FOSDEM 2025 The Swift community had a strong presence at FOSDEM 2025, the world’s largest independently run open source conference, held every year in Brussels, Belgium. • FOSDEM highlighted a range of Swift-related talks related to memory safety, a broad ecosystem around Swift including using it to develop web services and embedded projects, and new areas of the project including Java interoperability. • In case you missed it, here are a few highlights from the event: Memory Safety in Swift The main track of the conference featured a talk presented by Doug Gregor on memory safety: “Incremental Memory Safety in an Established Software Stack: Lessons Learned from Swift.” If you’re interested in learning more about Swift’s memory safe features, this talk is a great place to start; it walks through the different dimensions of memory safety in Swift, the language’s safe interoperability with C(++), and reflects on lessons learned for both programming language design and adopting Swift in an established software codebase. • To learn more about memory safety in Swift, see the Swift documentation page on memory safety, as well as the vision document on memory safety. • Swift DevRoom FOSDEM is primarily organized into DevRooms, volunteer-organized conference tracks around technical communities and topics. • This year Swift celebrated its inaugural DevRoom organized by a local community member, Steven Van Impe, with contributio

Article Summaries:

  • At FOSDEM 2025, the Swift community highlighted its growing ecosystem through a series of talks on memory safety, cross‑platform development, and Java interoperability. Doug Gregor presented “Incremental Memory Safety in an Established Software Stack,” outlining Swift’s safe C/C++ interop and lessons for language design. The conference also hosted Swift’s first DevRoom, featuring 12 sessions on Linux support, IDE integration, embedded Swift projects, and server‑side tracing. In the Free Java DevRoom, Konrad Malawski explored Swift/Java interoperability, demonstrating new foreign‑function and memory APIs that enable high‑performance integration without full rewrites. The event underscored Swift’s expanding reach across web services, embedded systems, and cross‑language collaboration.

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