During WWDC last year in 2015, Apple announced that Swift, their new programming language, would be going open source. On December 3, 2015, Apple announced that Swift was now open source.
Apple Platforms and Linux
Swift is not just open source on Apple’s own platforms, Apple has brought it to the Linux platform as well. This is great, for one example, developers can use Swift in their apps on Apple products to communicate with Linux servers much better. This should allow apps to become an even better user experience for users, not just a plus for developers.
The Possibilities
Swift is a relatively new programming language. It was actually only introduced back in 2014 during Apple’s developer conference, WWDC. Swift has made much progress and has become a programming language that developers seem to really like. Since Swift is now open source, and developers can contribute to making Swift better over time, it means that it will have more to offer as a programming language much fast than it would of with Apple solely working on it. With the ability now for people to contribute to Swift, it is going to be very exciting to see how Swift grows in the future with people contributing to it.
At this time Swift is only available on the Apple and Linux platforms. It will be interesting to see if Swift will make its way to other platforms such as Windows and Android in the future. There could be much potential for that if it happens, similar to the potential to having Swift available on the Linux platform.
Requirements
Here are the software requirements at the time of this post for Swift.
Apple:
OS X 10.11 and Xcode 7.2
Linux:
Ubuntu 14.04 or 15.10, both in 64-bit.
If you want to download the source code for Swift, you can find the download on Swift’s website at swift.org. You can learn more about Swift there as well, and at apple.com/swift.
In all, Swift is a great programming language that is only going to get better over time. If you have any questions regarding Swift, please comment below and we will answer them to the best of our abilities.