Swift Surpasses All: Why Apple's Language Became the Growth Leader in 2025

GitHub named Swift the fastest growing language of the year

The GitHub platform presented its annual Octoverse 2025 report, and the main surprise was Swift's leadership. Apple's language showed a record increase in the number of active repositories — by 42% over the last 12 months, outpacing Rust (38%) and Python (31%).

"Swift has ceased to be a niche language for iOS developers," comments Maria Kovaleva, technical director of AlfaDigital. "Thanks to SwiftUI and expansion to the server side via Vapor, we are seeing explosive interest from startups and the enterprise segment."

According to GitHub data, the number of Swift projects related to machine learning has doubled — this is due to the Swift for TensorFlow framework and Apple's MLX library. Additionally, 27% of new Swift repositories were for cross-platform applications (Linux + macOS).

Experts link the growth to the release of Swift 6.0, which introduced full thread safety and improved compatibility with C++. "This made it possible to use Swift in high-load systems where C++ and Rust previously dominated," notes Apple engineer Tim Smith in his blog.

Interestingly, Swift overtook Kotlin in the number of open-source contributors (growth of 35% versus 22%). Meanwhile, the traditional leader JavaScript retained first place in the absolute number of projects, but its share decreased by 4%.

"Swift is becoming the language of choice for those who want the safety of Rust and the development speed of Python," summarizes Kovaleva. "In 2026, we expect even greater penetration of Swift into IoT and cloud services."

The full Octoverse 2025 report is available on the GitHub website. For Python developers interested in Swift, we recommend exploring the swift.org project and tutorials on integrating Swift with Python via the SwiftPython library.