What’s new “foundation” thing?
Asked on 06/19/2025
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At WWDC, Apple introduced significant updates to the Foundation framework, particularly with the transition to Swift. The Foundation framework, which has been a core part of Apple's ecosystem since the early days of Mac OS X, has been rewritten from Legacy C and Objective-C into modern, portable Swift. This change allows for a more consistent, higher quality, and better-performing framework across all platforms. The new Swift Foundation is open source, inviting community contributions and an open evolution process for adding new APIs. For example, the Predicate API is now available on all platforms in Swift 6 via Swift Foundation, and it also gained support for regular expressions.
Additionally, Apple introduced the Foundation Models framework, which provides access to on-device large language models that power Apple intelligence. This framework is available on macOS, iOS, iPadOS, and VisionOS, and it allows developers to enhance existing app features or create new ones, all while keeping data private and running offline.
For more details, you can refer to the session What’s new in Swift (11:27) and Meet the Foundation Models framework (00:00).
What’s new in Swift
Join us for an update on Swift. We’ll briefly go through a history of Swift over the past decade, and show you how the community has grown through workgroups, expanded the package ecosystem, and increased platform support. We’ll introduce you to a new language mode that achieves data-race safety by default, and a language subset that lets you run Swift on highly constrained systems. We’ll also explore some language updates including noncopyable types, typed throws, and improved C++ interoperability.
What’s new in Swift
Join us for an update on Swift. We’ll talk about workflow improvements that make you more productive, and new and modernized library APIs for fundamental programming tasks. We’ll show examples of Swift adoption throughout more layers of the software stack. Finally, we’ll explore new language features for both improving approachability of concurrency, and achieving peak performance when you need it.
Meet the Foundation Models framework
Learn how to tap into the on-device large language model behind Apple Intelligence! This high-level overview covers everything from guided generation for generating Swift data structures and streaming for responsive experiences, to tool calling for integrating data sources and sessions for context management. This session has no prerequisites.