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2024: A Year In Conferences Speaking about Swift for WebAssembly
by Steven Van Impe

Introduction

Let's start 2025 with a look back at what we've been doing in 2024.

One of my major goals for 2024 was to resume speaking at conferences. This is something that I started doing before COVID happened, and I found it both challenging and enjoyable. I also needed a way to spread the word about PWS Academy and announce this new website, so I turned to my to-do list and started looking for a topic for my next talk.

Swift for WebAssembly

I ended up choosing SwiftWasm, a project that adds support for WebAssembly to Swift. SwiftWasm opens up new use cases for Swift outside of Apple platforms. This brought the project to the top of my to-do list.

So, as 2023 came to a close, I started diving deep into WebAssembly and SwiftWasm. Several months later, I had learned a lot about WebAssembly and developed a set of example projects to help developers get started with SwiftWasm. I then built a talk around these projects, submitted my proposals, and started waiting.

I was unsure what to expect, as this is definitely an unusual topic for Swift conferences, most of which still revolve around iOS. Much to my surprise, I received mostly positive feedback, and got invited to speak at the following conferences:

Recordings of these talks are available below, as are the examples I demonstrated.

The Talks

Swift Craft

ServerSide.swift

Pragma Conference

The Examples

Source code and documentation for my example projects is available on GitHub.

These projects require either a SwiftWasm toolchain, or a SwiftWasm SDK with a compatible toolchain from swift.org. Carefully follow the instructions in the repository to get started.

Bonus Talk

As an added bonus, I also gave a short lightning talk about Swift in higher education at Swift Craft. This talk was very last-minute and mostly unprepared, but nevertheless a nice opportunity to spread the word about PWS Academy.

A recording of this talk is available below.