Swift, Apple’s programming language targeted towards OS X and iOS developers, has just been released as open source. Under the Apache License, all of the source code—which covers code for a unique package manager—is going to be open to edit and compile. This means that programs can be created without any attribution.
In a press release on the Apple site, the company announced that developers from all over the world can contribute to new Swift optimizations and features, thereby bringing Swift to more computing platforms than ever before. This includes any entity from app developers to enterprises to educational institutions.
Introduced only last year, Swift has experienced rapid growth, making it the quickest-growing programming language in history. Swift has two things going for it: it combines the effectiveness and proven track record of established languages with the straightforwardness and interactivity of well-known scripting languages.
Swift has an interesting history. It began way back in 2010 under creator Chris Lattner; after fours years of work, Apple finally announced its availability at a developer conference last year. Lattner himself borrowed quite a bit from other languages such as Ruby, Haskell, Python, C#, Objective-C and Rust.
In conjunction with this open-sourcing of Swift, Apple unveiled the Swift.org website. This is the place to go for curious designers and developers who need to know everything from tech documentation to community links and resources. It’s also where to head to actually download the Swift source code.
What makes Swift so attractive is the freedom that designers and developers can enjoy when working with it. The programming language empowers them with the flexibility they need to come up with the next iteration of cutting-edge software.
It’s also popular among new designers and developers because it’s easy to use and learn, even for those who don’t have any prior experience with it. Amazingly, it’s also easy to learn for those who’ve never coded before.
Created with safety in mind, Swift has the power to neutralize whole categories of typical programming errors as well.
The open code is available right now on Github and comes complete with support for all of Apple’s software platforms. This includes iOS, OS X, tvOS and watchOS. Linux developers can rejoice, too, as Swift is open-sourced for Linux.
Here are all of the components that come with it:
- The standard library
- The Swift compiler
- The debugger
- The package manager and REPL
- The foundation libraries
Thanks to the Apache 2.0 license that features a runtime library exception, you can efficiently incorporate Swift into their own software and then port the language to other platforms.
Now that it can reach more designers and developers than ever, it’ll be interesting to see what people create with it. Swift can be used anywhere from mobile devices to the cloud, and Apple is betting on the fact that its easy accessibility will inspire a whole, new generation of creatives and programmers to get into coding in earnest.
