Apple at its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) this week announced the latest advancements for the Swift language, SwiftUI framework, and Xcode IDE. Highlights include concurrency enhancements and improved C++ and Java interoperability for Swift, compilation caching for Xcode, and new design APIs in SwiftUI.
With Swift 6.2, developers can incrementally adopt Swift in existing C++, C, and Objective-C apps to make code safer and more efficient, Apple said. The swift-java interoperability project now allows developers to incorporate Swift in Java code. Updates to concurrency make asynchronous and concurrent code easier to write correctly. Inline arrays enable developers to declare fixed-size arrays, which allows for compile-time optimizations. A new Span type provides an alternative to unsafe buffer pointers. Apple also introduced Containerization, an open-source project written in Swift for building and running Linux containers on macOS and Apple silicon.
With Xcode 26, in addition to built-in support for ChatGPT, Xcode now allows developers to use generative AI powered by a large language model of their choice, either by using API keys from other providers or running local models on their Mac (Apple silicon required). Coding Tools now provides suggestions to help developers quickly write documentation, fix an issue, or make a code change, Apple said. Compilation caching, introduced as an opt-in feature, speeds up iterative build and test cycles for Swift and C-family languages. Compilation caching caches the results of compilations that were produced for a set of source files and, when it detects that the same set of source files are getting re-compiled, speeds up builds by providing prior compilation results directly from the cache.
Xcode 26 also includes a preview of a new implementation for Swift package builds, based on shared code with Swift Package Manager. This should improve the consistency and stability of builds across the package manager and Xcode, Apple said.
Finally, SwiftUI, Apple’s user interface toolkit, has been updated to support Apple’s new Liquid Glass, which Apple describes as a dynamic design material that combines the optical properties of glass with a sense of fluidity. SwiftUI also adds new APIs for immersive spaces in visionOS, new WebKit APIs for bringing web content into Swift apps, and 3D Swift Charts based on RealityKit, Apple’s 3D and augmented reality framework.