This session is completely open and informal—no set agenda, just a relaxed space to chat, share ideas, and connect with fellow Embedded Swift developers. Whether you're looking to showcase your latest project, seek advice, or just hang out, you're welcome to join the conversation.
Feel free to invite others who might be interested. Let’s use this opportunity to learn from each other and build a vibrant, collaborative community together!
I'll just say I'm very excited about and looking forward to this meetup on Discord! @rauhul the idea is that this is a voice channel + any text discussions on the #embedded channel, correct?
Embedded Swift Community Hour – March 14th, 2025 – Recap
Thank you all for joining the first Embedded Swift Community Hour! It was a pleasure meeting everyone and hearing about the many ways you're using Embedded Swift.
I’d love to hear any feedback—feel free to share your thoughts in this thread or send me a DM.
Attendance & Projects
We had around 20 participants throughout the hour, joining from locations worldwide, including California, Utah, Ontario, Belgium, the Netherlands, England, Denmark, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Ukraine, and more!
Attendees shared a variety of Embedded Swift projects, including:
@mortenbekditlevsen’s handheld device project with their daughter
A major topic of discussion was how to improve the onboarding process for new Embedded Swift developers. Rough edges included:
SourceKit-LSP setup can be tricky to configure reliably
A simple SwiftPM package template for Embedded Swift would be helpful
Interest in a simple Swift-based IDE similar to Arduino Studio or MicroPython
Lack of high-level guides for different development styles ("easy mode" vs. "hard mode")
A need for more structured documentation on integrating Swift with existing C libraries
Bare-Metal Development
For those working at a lower level, several technical topics came up:
Embedded Swift on Linux
Interest in using Embedded Swift for Linux user space (and kernel space) for extremely small binary sizes
Discussion around the feasibility of a portable Swift libc or bringing swift-system to embedded
Platform Considerations
Interest in examples setting up ARM vector tables and clearer documentation on low-level startup code
Exploring how Swift should handle platform dependencies (e.g. memory allocation, etc.)
Potential support for architectures beyond ARM and RISC-V, including Xtensa, Z80, and Arduino platforms
Build System & Interoperability
Challenges in integrating SwiftPM with other build systems like CMake (e.g., Pico SDK)
Interest in generating C headers from Swift (-emit-objc-header equivalent for C/C++/Obj-C++)
Questions on how to take an existing Swift library and make it work in Embedded Swift
Bridging the Gap: From High-Level to Bare-Metal
Emerging from these two discussions was the theme of smoothing the transition between high-level SDKs and low-level bare-metal development. Some key takeaways:
What boards and toolchains are best suited for different levels of abstraction?
Can Embedded Swift provide an "out-of-the-box" experience while still enabling fine-grained control?
Next Steps
It was great to see so much interest and engagement in Embedded Swift! There's a lot of excitement around making Swift more accessible for embedded development, and I'm looking forward to further discussions and collaboration in the future.
We definitely need real documentation on how to use C / C++ / Obj-C interop and have it hosted on Swift.org. Additionally it would be good to host the Python and Java interop there as well; I've mentioned this to @Douglas_Gregor in the past too!
Project Links:
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