Apple Open Sources The Swift Programming Language
by Brandon Chester on December 3, 2015 1:55 PM EST_678x452.png)
Back in June at WWDC 2015 Apple surprised a number of people by announcing that they would be making their Swift programming language open source in the near future. Swift is, in a way, a successor to Apple's Objective-C programming language. It opens up development for iOS and OS X to developers that may have struggled with some of the idiosyncrasies of Objective-C, while also including a number of features that have become common among modern programming languages.
Today it appears that everything relating to licensing has been sorted out, and with version 2.2 the Swift programming language will now be made available under the Apache License 2.0, which is the same open source license used by the Android operating system. With Swift going open source, any member of the community can now propose additions to the language. The project is now available on the Apple Github account, along with some other repositories that are home to supporting tools like versions of the LLVM compiler and LLDB debugger for Swift.
Along with today's announcement of Swift going open source, there are some notices regarding the development of Swift 3. With Swift still being very much in development, Apple is giving developers a heads up that anything they write now is liable to break with future updates and will need to be fixed to support new coding styles, syntax, etc. There are some other announcements as well, such as a new package manager for sharing and distributing Swift code which would be great to see integrated into OS X in the future. Developers who are interested in some of today's Swift-related developments can get more info from the official Swift website.
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mr_tawan - Thursday, December 3, 2015 - link
How about Swift -> .NET IL compiler ?jimbo2779 - Thursday, December 3, 2015 - link
Also there is .NET native so the talk about .NET always being in a VM will be going away very soon.IanHagen - Friday, December 4, 2015 - link
I absolutely love Swift. For years I've been steadfast on Ruby being the language that pleased me the most when working with and nurtured a visible admiration for C#, but Swift managed to quickly become my favourite working tool. I couldn't be happier to see it being open sourced.Communism - Friday, December 4, 2015 - link
Being enamored by apple backend is a dangerous business, as they trump even google at the rate that they deprecate support for anything and everything in their software stack.Have fun rewriting your code every time they push an update to Swift :P
IanHagen - Friday, December 4, 2015 - link
The jump from Swift 1.2 to Swift 2 was quite seamless. Xcode did 95% of the job fixing syntax discrepancies. My hand work was about the new exception system, having to catch error in a few classes. It didn't take that long. I didn't love it, but I still think that the effort was worth it when I compare to how it feels to have to think in, let's say, Java. I honestly think it's a shame I can't use Swift besides Cocoa development.nmodin - Thursday, December 17, 2015 - link
I have to agree. I've been doing Java development since the last millennia, and just so happened to get involved with som iOS related work a few years back. Not really a fan of Objective-C I must say, but you get used to it. Now with Swift you really see what a good language should give you. Kotlin for Android looks a lot like it, and imho that doesn't mean that Google copied Apple or vice versa. It makes Kotlin a good modern language as is Swift. I'd say that most of the people here "bickering and arguing about who killed who" should grow up, and take interest in programming rather than moronic bitching about platforms/companies and who has the bigger proverbial ****.nmodin - Thursday, December 17, 2015 - link
And yes, the changes so far has been un-fun, but very far from unmanageable. I'd also say that there is a big chance the changes will be less intrusive moving forward as Swift only been around a year and as all new languages SHOULD change based on user feedback.Communism - Friday, December 4, 2015 - link
Lol @ the apple circle jerk in the comments on every one of the articles that pertain even peripherally to apple.Anand and Brian are gone guys, your job of getting them apple brownie points is done. Shoo.
ciderrules - Friday, December 4, 2015 - link
Lol @ the poor upset troll whining about Apple articles.Michael Bay - Saturday, December 5, 2015 - link
Going by your reaction, he`s totally right.