New GitHub Organization for the Swift Project

This was also posted on the Swift.org blog.

Today, we are announcing an exciting development for the Swift programming language: its migration to a dedicated GitHub organization at GitHub.com/swiftlang.

This migration reflects the growth and maturity of the Swift community and highlights Swift's versatility beyond Apple's own ecosystems. Over the last decade, many inspiring individuals' hard and creative work has elevated Swift into various creative and practical applications. With a GitHub organization dedicated to Swift, we are creating an even more conducive environment for collaboration and innovation. This change will allow Swift to expand its reach to more platforms and use cases, sparking fresh possibilities and broadening Swift's impact across the technology landscape.

Timeline and Initial Scope

The migration to the swiftlang organization will be phased over the coming weeks and months, striking a balance between minimizing disruption and ensuring a deliberate completion. Initially, the swiftlang organization will include foundational elements of the Swift project, such as:

  • Compiler and core tools
  • Standard libraries and core APIs
  • Samples
  • The Swift.org website
  • Official clients, drivers, and other packages (coming soon)

As we move forward, we will address several key governance aspects:

  • Methods for integrating new projects into the organization and guiding them through a successful maturity cycle
  • Utilization of GitHub teams and other tools to expand our contributor base and clearly define roles for commiters
  • Extend and augment continuous integration (CI) support to ensure Swift and all of its components is a well-tested, production-ready programming language for all use cases

A Community Journey

Various groups within our community will spearhead this migration, including the Core Team, the Contributor Experience Workgroup, the Swift Server Workgroup, and the Website Workgroup. This initiative represents a community-wide effort, with full transparency, as changes progressively unfold.

As a first step, we will move the swift-evolution repository today, with other repositories transitioning over the coming weeks. We will post updates to this forum post as the migration unfurls.

On behalf of the core team, I want to express our deep gratitude to everyone who has contributed to the Swift dream, from its inception a decade ago to today. Together, we are building the pathways for the next chapter of Swift!

Onward!

Ted (and the Swift Core Team)

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Thanks Ted! Excited for this change. Does GitHub support a mechanism for redirecting links to migrated repositories like this? It would be a shame if old links to the repos under the apple org were just perennially outdated (or worse, broken) after this migration.

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All existing links should redirect.

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Wow! Super exciting! Happy 10 years!

Perhaps a very silly question, but this list:

did not include the language itself, I guess github.com/apple/swift too should be in the list? :)

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Yes, swift is included in the list.

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Ah under "compiler" :) ofc!

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Great news, looking forward to it.

I've been meaning to post that now would be a good time for the language workgroup and core team to elucidate a vision for the next 10 years of Swift, maybe as a blog post.

Swift has been very successful in some important ways over the last decade, but it has not become as widely used cross-platform as Java or C++, and people have doubts about where the language is going.

Now would be a good time to rise up from the trees and give a view of the forest, ie the core team and workgroups' vision of where to go next. Obviously, as an OSS project, anybody is free to do whatever they like with the code in their own personal forks, but this is about the vision of the core contributors, of where they plan to spend their efforts in the coming years.

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I am (I bet "we are") happy to hear the news which means great advancement of Swift and its community.


:speech_balloon: My self-interested concern is about Commit Access. I hope Commit Access won't lapse due to this migration so that we (people who are not at Apple) can continue to make contribution to the Swift project.

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This is an amazing step in a very forward looking direction for Swift. I think many of those looking to adopt Swift have some concerns about its evolution, and whether or not their needs align with Apple’s. Overall, it’s things like this that will continue to push this language even further, and on behalf of my colleagues as well as myself — congratulations to the entire Swift team and the continued community effort!

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This is something that my company has been concerned about, and myself as well. I love the Swift language and the features it provides, so seeing Apple make these moves and seeing the WWDC24 sessions have really bolstered my confidence in the future of the language. It is truly the perfect C++ successor.

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Hi to everyone following along! :wave:

We've migrated 21 repositories to date, including swift-evolution, swift-package-manager, swift-org-website, and more. We hope to complete this process by the end of July. Follow the GitHub org for notifications.

You'll see more communications around various GitHub management and contributor experience topics related to the new organization ("org") over the next few weeks and into the coming months. Are you interested in topics like this? The Contributor Experience Workgroup will have more ways to get involved in the upcoming months.

For folks pending access into the org or troubleshooting lost access:

Full schedule, pending no issues with migrations:
:white_check_mark: July 1: /swift-driver
:white_check_mark: July 8: /swift-docc, /swift-docc-plugin, /swift-docc-symbolkit, swift-docc-render-artifact, /swift-docc-render, /swift-markdown, /swift-lmdb
:white_check_mark: July 11: /llvm-project and /swift-llvm-bindings
:white_check_mark: July 15: /swift-llbuild
:white_check_mark: July 17: /swift-experimental-string-processing, /swift-se0270-range-set, /swift-se0288-is-power
:white_check_mark: July 23: /swift-package-registry-compatibility-test-suite, /swift-book

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Updates for folks following this thread:

We are migrating the following repos, today, September 20th, between the window of 3-4pm PT / 10-11pm UTC.

:white_check_mark: /swift-foundation
:white_check_mark: /swift-foundation-icu
:ballot_box_with_check: /swift-corelibs-foundation

We are expecting all three repos to be down for activities (pushing, pulling, merging, etc) for the duration of that window. I'll circle back after we have completed various milestones.

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