Apple announced programming language Swift last year as a replacement for Objective C as the language for iOS, OS X, watchOS, and tvOS apps. The company announced this week that it is releasing it as open source.
Apple says the broad community of developers ranging from app developers to educational institutions and enterprises can now contribute to new Swift features and optimizations as well as bring the language to new computing platforms.
The company also launched Swift.org as a place to obtain detailed info about the language, including documentation and community resources. You can also download the source code from there.
The code is available via GitHub. Components include the Swift compiler, debugger, standard library, foundation libraries, package manager and REPL.
“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 Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering. “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,” the company says. “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.”
According to Apple, Swift is the fastest growing programming language of all time.
