Announcing the Language Workgroup

Ted Kremenek Ted Kremenek
Ted Kremenek is a member of the Swift Core Team and serves as the voice of the Project Lead. Ted manages the Languages and Runtimes group at Apple.

The Swift community has accomplished a great deal together, with hundreds of changes to Swift through the Swift Evolution process and significant advances to the language and tooling since Swift became an open-source project. In recent years, there has been increased momentum in the community through various workgroups, including Diversity in Swift and the Server Workgroup. The Core Team recognizes the opportunity to tap into the potential of these workgroups to amplify the impact of the community and support more members of the community driving impactful investments.

I am excited to share some significant developments in the Swift community structure designed to help the workgroup model flourish. Today, we are launching the Language Workgroup, which will take on the primary responsibility of oversight of the language and standard library. With a workgroup dedicated to the language evolution, the Core Team will invest more in the overall oversight and direction of the project. The Core Team members will serve as stewards to align the efforts of the various workgroups and shepherd the strategy for building an ever more vibrant open source project and surrounding community.

Language Workgroup

The members of the Language Workgroup are experts that the Swift Project Lead and the Core Team have identified as possessing a balance of perspectives and expertise to review, guide, and strategically align changes to the language mindfully. Over the coming weeks, the Core Team will work with the Language Workgroup to draft an operating charter and ensure a smooth transition of responsibility.

Several current Core Team members will be joining the Language Workgroup:

They will be joined on the Language Workgroup by the following individuals:

Becca Royal-Gordon has participated in the Swift Evolution process since its inception, first as an independent app developer and later as a member of the Apple Swift team. She brings her practical experience from writing iOS, Mac, and web apps to Swift’s language design and compiler implementation.

Freddy Kellison-Linn is a long-time iOS developer who has been a participant in the Swift Evolution community since the language was first open-sourced. He has authored and implemented several accepted evolution proposals, most recently Type Placeholders. He is enthusiastic about building powerful software tools that are easy to use, and is excited to continue helping make the Swift language and community the best they can be.

Holly Borla is a member of the Apple Swift team and the Diversity in Swift workgroup. Previously, Holly has served as a teaching assistant for programming students, a Swift programmer working on Xcode, and a core contributor to the generics proposals in Swift 5.7. She approaches language design from her perspective as an educator, a Swift IDE and type checker implementor, and an advocate for fostering a diverse and inclusive open source community.

Steve Canon is a member of the Apple Swift team, author of several Swift Evolution proposals, and frequent contributor to the standard library. Previously he worked for over a decade on numerics libraries and the language and hardware features that support them.

Tony Allevato is an engineer at Google who maintains their developer tooling for engineers using Swift. His Swift contributions include Equatable/Hashable synthesis and swift-format. Previously he was a computer science educator, which drives his interest in Swift and in making it a language that is equally approachable to newcomers and experienced developers.

Xiaodi Wu is a longtime member of the Swift community. He is a contributor to various Swift Evolution proposals as well as the standard library, with a focus on generic integer and floating-point implementations. Xiaodi comes to language design from the broader science community with a sensibility for ease of use by the non-specialist.

Swift Core Team

A primary role of the Core Team going forward is to provide cohesion across these various workgroups, providing support and strategic alignment. To support this new role for the Core Team, we are adjusting its membership. Some current members will transition off the Core Team to focus their efforts within the new Language Workgroup, with some new members joining today.

Several current Core Team members will continue on the Core Team with its adjusted charter:

They will be joined on the Swift Core Team by the following individuals:

Marc Aupont is a member of the Diversity in Swift workgroup, and has been a champion for inclusion and diversity within developer communities for many years. In addition to his work as an iOS engineer at Nike, Marc has worked to create opportunities for technical growth in the Swift community by organizing meetups for beginners, sharing his own experience and expertise through mentorship programs, and working collaboratively with HBCU students on app development.

Paris Pittman has spent the last 20 years helping communities grow and flourish — from building hometown Baltimore tech communities to driving belonging and sustainability in massive open source ecosystems like Kubernetes. Paris is a member of Apple’s Open Source Program Office and serves as the Kubernetes representative on the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Governing Board. She is a Kubernetes Steering Committee Member and Maintainer.

The Project Lead invited Marc and Paris to join the Swift Core Team to bring their enthusiasm, unique experiences, and perspectives to further accelerate the momentum of building up the community around the Swift project.

Ben and Holly will directly represent the Swift Core Team in the Language Workgroup.

Both Saleem and Tom are avid champions of broadening out Swift’s reach to more domains. Tom has been an ardent champion of Swift on Server, and Saleem is the platform maintainer for Swift on Windows.