By making Swift open source, Apple enables the entire developer community to contribute to the programming language and help bring it to even more platforms.
Apple today announced that the Swift programming language is open source. As an open source language, the broad community of talented developers – from app developers to educational institutions and businesses – can contribute to new Swift features and optimizations and help bring Swift to new computing platforms.
Created in 2014, Swift is the fastest-growing programming language in history, combining the performance and efficiency of compiled languages with the simplicity and interactivity of popular scripting languages. Additionally, today Apple launched Swift.org, a website with detailed information about Swift open source, including technical documentation, community resources, and links to download Swift source code.
“Making Swift open source allows the entire developer community to contribute to the programming language and help it reach even more platforms,” said Craig Federighi, Apple. “The power of Swift and its 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 groundbreaking generation of software. Swift can be used even if you have never programmed before, and it is the first systems programming language that is as expressive and enjoyable as a scripting language. Designed for safety, Swift eliminates entire categories of common programming errors.
Swift open source is available via GitHub and includes support for all of Apple – iOS, OS X, watchOS and tvOS – as well as Linux. Available components 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 the exception of the runtime library exception, allowing users to easily integrate Swift into their own software and making the language travel to new platforms.
