Apple was as good as their word when they promised their proprietary development language Swift would go open source before the end of the year, as the company has pushed the button, and made the project available via Swift.org.
We are excited by this new chapter in the story of Swift. After Apple unveiled the Swift programming language, it quickly became one of the fastest growing languages in history. Swift makes it easy to write software that is incredibly fast and safe by design. Now that Swift is open source, you can help make the best general purpose programming language available everywhere.
With the announcement, developers can now use the language to go beyond the development of just iOS, Mac, and watchOS apps, using the language to develop for other arenas.
Swift was announced at WWDC 2014, and then debuted a few months later alongside iOS 8 and OS X 10.10 Yosemite. The language is a departure from the traditional Objective-C language previously used to develop apps for iOS devices and Mac computers. The language quickly became popular among developers, with some 78% of developers surveyed who were working with the language saying they were eager to continue using it,
Apple has published the language, its supporting libraries, debugger, and package manager under the Apache 2.0 license with a Runtime Library Exception, and created a website to host the project. The source code is hosted on hosted on GitHub. Apple says, “Everyone is welcome, even just to file a bug report. There are excellent Getting Started guides available here on the site as well.”
Apple has also released a Linux port of the language, and has begun sharing design guidelines related to the upcoming 3 edition of the development language.
(Via MacRumors)
