Foundation provides a base layer of functionality useful in many applications, including fundamental types for numbers, data, collections, and dates, as well as functions for task management, file system access, and more.
It is designed with these goals in mind:
- Provide a small set of basic utility types
- Enable a level of platform independence, to enhance portability
- Demonstrate useful conventions that can be widely adopted by the Swift ecosystem
- Support internationalization and localization to make software accessible around the world
This project, swift-foundation, provides a shared implementation of key Foundation API for all platforms.
On macOS, iOS, and other Apple platforms, apps should use the Foundation that comes with the operating system. The Foundation framework includes this code.
On all other Swift platforms, swift-foundation is available as part of the toolchain. Simply import FoundationEssentials or import FoundationInternationalization to use its API. It is also re-exported from swift-corelibs-foundation's Foundation, FoundationXML, and FoundationNetworking modules.
Note
Building swift-foundation requires the in-development Swift 6.0 toolchain. You can download the Swift 6.0 nightly toolchain from the Swift website.
Before building Foundation, first ensure that you have a Swift toolchain installed. Next, check out the Getting Started section of the Foundation Build Process guide for detailed steps on building and testing.
Foundation builds in different configurations and is composed of several projects.
graph TD;
FF[Foundation.framework]-->SF
subgraph GitHub
SCLF[swift-corelibs-foundation]-->SF
SF[swift-foundation]-->FICU[swift-foundation-icu]
SF-->SC[swift-collections]
end
A shared library shipped in the Swift toolchain, written in Swift. It provides the core implementation of many key types, including URL, Data, JSONDecoder, Locale, Calendar, and more in the FoundationEssentials and FoundationInternationalization modules. Its source code is shared across all platforms.
swift-foundation depends on a limited set of packages, primarily swift-collections and swift-syntax.
A shared library shipped in the Swift toolchain. It provides compatibility API for clients that need pre-Swift API from Foundation. It is written in Swift and C. It provides, among other types, NSObject, class-based data structures, NSFormatter, and NSKeyedArchiver. It re-exports the FoundationEssentials and FoundationInternationalization modules, allowing compatibility for source written before the introduction of the swift-foundation project. As these implementations are distinct from those written in Objective-C, the compatibility is best-effort only.
swift-corelibs-foundation builds for non-Darwin platforms only. It installs the Foundation umbrella module, FoundationXML, and FoundationNetworking.
A private library for Foundation, wrapping ICU. Using a standard version of ICU provides stability in the behavior of our internationalization API, and consistency with the latest releases on Darwin platforms. It is imported from the FoundationInternationalization module only. Clients that do not need API that relies upon the data provided by ICU can import FoundationEssentials instead.
A framework built into macOS, iOS, and all other Darwin platforms. It is written in a combination of C, Objective-C, and Swift. The Foundation framework compiles the sources from swift-foundation into its binary and provides one Foundation module that contains all features.
Foundation's goal is to create the best fundamental data types and internationalization features, and make them available to Swift developers everywhere. It takes advantage of emerging features in the language as they are added, and enables library and app authors to build higher level API with confidence.
This project is part of the overall Swift project. It has a workgroup to (a) oversee community API proposals and (b) to closely coordinate with developments in the Swift project and Apple platforms. The workgroup meets regularly to review proposals, look at emerging trends in the Swift ecosystem, and discuss how the library should evolve.
Foundation welcomes contributions from the community, including bug fixes, tests, documentation, and ports to new platforms.
We use the Swift forums for discussion and GitHub Issues for tracking bugs, feature requests, and other work.
Please see the CONTRIBUTING document for more information, including the process for accepting community contributions for new API in Foundation.