Swift, Apple’s programming language aimed at OS X and iOS developers, has gone open source under the Apache License. This means all of the source code, including the code for a new package manager, will be available to edit and compile and programs can be created without attribution. Apple is also revealing further plans for the language on their new site, swift.org (the site is down at the moment).
Creator Chris Lattner began working on Swift in 2010 and Apple announced availability at a 2014 developer conference. Lattner took inspiration from “Objective-C, Rust, Haskell, Ruby, Python, C#, CLU, and far too many others to list.” Programmers can use the language to create desktop apps as well as iOS programs. The open source version also includes Linux binaries as well as a command line tool for running programs against files and folders.
The code is available today and can be compiled anywhere on any platform – an interesting and open move for the corporation.
