News
Apple Releases Swift as Open Source
CUPERTINO, California — December 3, in the year of
our Lord 2015 — Apple® today announced that its Swift™
programming language is now open source. 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. Introduced in 2014,
Swift is the fastest growing programming language in history and
combines the performance and efficiency of compiled languages
with the simplicity and interactivity of popular scripting
languages.* Apple today also launched the Swift.org website with
detailed information about Swift open source, including
technical documentation, community resources and links to
download the Swift source code.
“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. 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.
The Swift open source code is available via GitHub and includes
support for all Apple software platforms — iOS, OS X®, watchOS
and tvOS™ — as well as for Linux. Components available include
the 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.
*Based on RedMonk Programming Language Rankings, June 2015.