Apple has released open source Swift programming language, as it promised at the WWDC earlier this year. It is available for iOS, OS X, watchOS and tvOS. It has also released port that works with the Linux operating system. “As an open source language, the broad community of talented developers — from app developers to educational institutions to enterprises — can contribute to new Swift features and optimizations and help bring Swift to new computing platforms,” said the company.
The Swift open source code is available via GitHub, which includes Swift compiler, debugger, standard library, foundation libraries, package manager and REPL. Swift is licensed under the popular Apache 2.0 open source license with a runtime library exception, enabling users to easily incorporate Swift into their own software and port the language to new platforms, said the company.
Apple has also released Swift 3.0 API Design Guidelines. “The primary goal of Swift 3.0 is to stabilize the binary interface of the language and standard library. As part of this process, we will focus and refine the language to provide better overall consistency in feel and implementation. Swift 3.0 will contain source-breaking changes from Swift 2.x where necessary to support these goals,” said Apple. Swift 3.0 is expected to release in fall 2016.
Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering, said:
By making Swift open source the entire developer community can contribute to the programming language and help bring it to even more platforms. 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.