Introduction
Earlier this year, Swift reached a new milestone by having its first-ever devroom at FOSDEM, the largest conference dedicated to free and open source software.
This post tells the story of how this finally came to be.
How it all began
It was all the way back in September 2018, while attending the inaugural ServerSide.swift conference, that I first brought up the idea of a Swift devroom at FOSDEM. While the Apple engineers I talked to welcomed this idea and wanted to pursue it, we had a lot of obstacles to overcome.
Swift had been open sourced a few years earlier but failed to capitalize on its initial hype to become a proper cross-platform contender. Its engineers were busy implementing features that advanced the developer experience on Apple platforms, while cross-platform support was left to the community. As a result, Swift struggled to gain acceptance outside of Apple platforms. However, it remained an amazing language with the potential to become the successor language-of-choice for many open source developers. It just needed a way to reach them, and FOSDEM was a great place to do so.
For the first few years, despite my relentless reminders that the call for devrooms was coming up, we never actually got a proposal submitted. I cannot say for sure what was blocking this, as I'm not privvy to the discussions that went on internally at Apple. It may just be that the timing was bad, the CfD window was too short, or the legal team had concerns. Nevertheless, I kept receiving positive encouragements and in 2023, I was asked by the Core Team to submit a proposal on behalf of the community.
Unfortunately, that proposal didn't get accepted. It's hard to say why as FOSDEM didn't provide any feedback. We may have been too ambitious requesting a whole-day track, or perhaps we just got unlucky given that the demand for devrooms far exceeds the number of available rooms.
Fast-forward one year and we were ready to try again. We were less ambitious this time and only requested a half-day track. Twelve days later, this landed in my mailbox:
The first-ever Swift devroom was about to happen at FOSDEM 2025!
The road to FOSDEM
That acceptance email made a lot of people happy, but we weren't done yet. There were still some hurdles to take, starting with the call for papers.
Our devroom would focus exclusively on open source and cross-platform support, so it excluded all of the usual iOS-related talks. We had already gathered some potential speakers on the forums a year earlier, but we didn't know how many of those would actually be able to attend FOSDEM. In the end, we just had to open the CfP, and wait to see what would come in.
While the CfP was going on, we put together a team to organize the devroom and review the submissions that were coming in. Fortunately, the CfP was a success and we had enough submissions to fill even a whole-day track. Sadly, this meant we had to reject a lot of submissions, but we did our best to squeeze in as many speakers as possible.
With our schedule finalized, our team assembled, and our speakers prepared, we were ready for the big day.
D-day
Overprepared as we were, we arrived at our devroom six hours early. Our room would be occupied by a different group for the first half of the day, so we wanted to get there early for some equipment checkups and staff briefings.
As the first group of the day arrived, we gathered our things and headed out into the campus to catch some of the talks and grab a quick lunch. We then rejoined at the room in time for the changeover. This changeover was going to be a decisive moment, as we were finally going to see how many people would show up for our devroom.
FOSDEM devrooms are usually packed and are expected to be so. Swift was new to the conference and doesn't get the same amount of hype as other languages do, so I was worried about not being able to fill the room. Fortunately, my concerns quickly disappeared as I saw the people coming in and filling all available seats. We reached our maximum capacity even before the first talk started!
The rest of the afternoon went by so fast. As devroom manager, I had assigned myself a free role so I could help out wherever help was needed. Fortunately, I had very little to worry about, thanks to our volunteers and the FOSDEM staff.
Our schedule felt a bit too packed, but all of the speakers had rehearsed their talk well and stayed within their allotted time. I was pleasantly surprised by how smooth things went.
A coming-of-age story
Swift's first devroom at FOSDEM was a big success. As I reflect back on how it came to be, I cannot help but feel like Swift is starting a new chapter in its life.
Earlier in this post, I mentioned that Swift so far hasn't lived up to its promise of being a cross-platform general-purpose programming language. However, recent events leave me hopeful that this promise may become reality after all.
Swift is quickly opening up new use cases by adding support for embedded platforms, WebAssembly, and Android. Its interoperability with C++ and Java also strengthens its case as a successor for these languages. Finally, Apple is now supporting projects such as the Visual Studio Code extension and the Swiftly toolchain manager, which improve the developer experience on non-Apple platforms.
I look forward to seeing the progress we can make this year, and hope we can present the results at FOSDEM 2026!
Our staff and speakers
