Apple’s annual global developer conference – WWDC showcases latest technologies and tools for the developers around the world. This year in WWDC 2024, Apple announced bringing Swift language to embedded devices. Swift has been a popular language to write desktop and mobiles apps as well as server backend and system software. Having Swift available for embedded devices, opens opportunity to build connected devices to a large developer base already familiar with Swift language. Embedded Swift is a subset of the Swift and will impose limitations on a certain language features.

Apple used Espressif’s ESP32-C6, a RISC-V architecture Wi-Fi 6 SoC, to demonstrate use of Embedded Swift to build a smart device that communicates using Matter protocol. Embedded Swift has ability to have bindings for native C/C++ API. The implementation uses such bindings to Espressif’s open-source ESP-IDF and ESP-Matter SDKs to provide an example to implement a Matter device in Embedded Swift language.

If developers want to start with a simpler setup, Apple also provides an LED strip example running on ESP32-C6.