Apple Open Sources The Swift Programming Language
by Brandon Chester on December 3, 2015 1:55 PM EST_678x452.png)
Back in June at WWDC 2015 Apple surprised a number of people by announcing that they would be making their Swift programming language open source in the near future. Swift is, in a way, a successor to Apple's Objective-C programming language. It opens up development for iOS and OS X to developers that may have struggled with some of the idiosyncrasies of Objective-C, while also including a number of features that have become common among modern programming languages.
Today it appears that everything relating to licensing has been sorted out, and with version 2.2 the Swift programming language will now be made available under the Apache License 2.0, which is the same open source license used by the Android operating system. With Swift going open source, any member of the community can now propose additions to the language. The project is now available on the Apple Github account, along with some other repositories that are home to supporting tools like versions of the LLVM compiler and LLDB debugger for Swift.
Along with today's announcement of Swift going open source, there are some notices regarding the development of Swift 3. With Swift still being very much in development, Apple is giving developers a heads up that anything they write now is liable to break with future updates and will need to be fixed to support new coding styles, syntax, etc. There are some other announcements as well, such as a new package manager for sharing and distributing Swift code which would be great to see integrated into OS X in the future. Developers who are interested in some of today's Swift-related developments can get more info from the official Swift website.
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genzai - Thursday, December 3, 2015 - link
uhhh, its open source. If people want it on windows, they can port it.IanHagen - Friday, December 4, 2015 - link
RemObjects's Silver already does a fairly okay job running Swift on Windows. I believe we'll see very good ports now that it has been opensourced.ComeOnNow - Wednesday, May 17, 2017 - link
Exactly, but Windows users are going to hate anyone daring to use anything else (it doesn't matter if it's way better they will wait for MSFT to copy it or they won't bother).solipsism - Thursday, December 3, 2015 - link
I fail to see what you're arguing against with your "key differentiator" comment since there is no comparison in the blog post to Microsoft or .Net.dsumanik - Thursday, December 3, 2015 - link
He's highlighting the fundamental difference behind the two organizations. Microsoft, and Google make significant attempts to make their API's available on almost any platform. Now, it doesn't always work out to perfection, but the point is they invest significant resources to do so, to the point of trying to corner and dominate market segments in the coding world.Apple on the other hand just looks after itself, helps no one in any way shape or form. Apple jst says here you guys go it's open source now, your'e so welcome. Oh by the way the next version is going to totally break everything just a heads up.
If you are a developer which path would you chose?
solipsism - Thursday, December 3, 2015 - link
It's funny that you believe that any for-profit company's objective is anything but how to benefit their bottom line.dsumanik - Thursday, December 3, 2015 - link
Its Ok, you are obviously not a dev and didn't understand what the big kids were talking about in the first place. Back to the app store for you, it's safer there and you can do more good for apple stocks buy giving them oney that you ever will on the anandtech comments section lol. Apple is the only company you have yto pay to develop products for lol. It really is a joke.dsumanik - Thursday, December 3, 2015 - link
If you are wondering why that last post was so garbled.. well you can blame apple aiuto correct...just sayin.solipsism - Thursday, December 3, 2015 - link
Of course. How could it be your fault¡solipsism - Thursday, December 3, 2015 - link
"Apple is the only company you have yto pay to develop products for"You're saying no other company takes a percentage or has another fees associated with their store or dev tools? (I just want to make sure that's exactly what you mean before I reply again)