Apple officially releases Swift programming language as open source

Apple today announced that its Swift programming language is now officially open source.

As an open source language, the broad community of talented developers — from app developers to educational institutions to enterprises — can contribute to new Swift features and optimizations and help bring Swift to new computing platforms. Introduced in 2014, Swift is the fastest growing programming language in history and combines the performance and efficiency of compiled languages with the simplicity and interactivity of popular scripting languages. Apple today also launched the Swift.org website with detailed information about Swift open source, including technical documentation, community resources and links to download the Swift source code.

MacDailyNews Note: Understandably, the Swift.org site is currently being pounded with interest, so please be patient or check it later.

“By making Swift open source the entire developer community can contribute to the programming language and help bring it to even more platforms,” said Craig “Hair Force One” Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering, in a statement. “Swift’s power and ease of use will inspire a new generation to get into coding, and with today’s announcement they’ll be able to take their ideas anywhere, from mobile devices to the cloud.”

Swift is a powerful and intuitive programming language that gives developers the freedom and capabilities they need to create the next generation of cutting-edge software. Swift is easy to learn and use, even if you’ve never coded before, and it’s the first systems programming language that is as expressive and enjoyable as a scripting language. Designed for safety, Swift also eliminates entire categories of common programming errors.

The Swift open source code is available via GitHub and includes support for all Apple software platforms — iOS, OS X, watchOS and tvOS — as well as for Linux. Components available include the Swift compiler, debugger, standard library, foundation libraries, package manager and REPL. Swift is licensed under the popular Apache 2.0 open source license with a runtime library exception, enabling users to easily incorporate Swift into their own software and port the language to new platforms.

Source: Apple Inc.

Visit Swift.org here.

MacDailyNews Take: Welcome to the future!