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.

→ swift.org/blog/memory-safety-ecosystem-talks-java-interoperability-fosdem-2025/

The Swift community showcased a robust presence at FOSDEM 2025, Europe's largest open-source conference in Brussels, with talks emphasising memory safety, a diverse ecosystem for web services and embedded projects, and Java interoperability.

Doug Gregor's main track presentation on "Incremental Memory Safety in an Established Software Stack: Lessons Learned from Swift" highlighted Swift's memory-safe features and adoption lessons, with resources available in Swift's documentation.

The inaugural Swift DevRoom, organised by Steven Van Impe, featured 12 talks including embedded applications like a ferrofluidic music visualiser, container image building, and distributed tracing in server-side Swift.

Konrad Malawski's session in the Free Java DevRoom delved into Swift/Java bindings for high-performance integration without full rewrites. This event underscores Swift's growing role in open-source innovation, encouraging broader adoption of Swift 6's data-race safety features across the ecosystem.