Of course, allowing developers to look inside Swift and contribute to its development means that it can also be used on new platforms. It’s already available for Linux, but Apple doesn’t note what other platforms Swift may arrive at.
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Apple’s in-house programming language, Swift, has gone open source. Going open source means that its potential audience will be far greater, as coders working on projects outside of the iOS and OS X ecosystem will now be able to implement the language. If you’re interested in playing around with it, Apple’s Swift.org site has more information – although it appears to be down right now.
“Swift makes it easy to write software that is incredibly fast and safe by design. After Apple unveiled the Swift programming language, it quickly became one of the fastest growing languages in history”. However, don’t expect to use Swift to port iOS applications to other platforms because the necessary libraries haven’t been open sourced and very likely never will. Swift on Linux doesn’t depend on any Objective C libraries and some of these are for things like strings and the port is admittedly a work in progress.
It’s an important signal to developers that Swift is more about helping developers write better code than it is about Apple pushing an agenda.
The source code is now available on GitHub, and features the compiler and standard library, core libraries, the package manager, and cloned repositories.
Thanks to Apple’s open-source-ing, all the flexibility and safety of the language can now be deployed by developers to create programs without the need for attribution.
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The Swift programming language, in development since 2010, was first introduced in June 2014 at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), with a stated objective of making coding apps and the like for the company’s various operating systems simpler.
