Apple Makes Its Swift Programming Language Open Source

Apple has made good on its promise to make Swift an open source programming language under the Apache License. The iPhone maker has also launched a dedicated website as Swift community’s main hub.

Apple’s Swift programming language has become very popular among the programmers in recent years and managed to earn a respectable place in the list of top programming languages. Earlier this year, Apple announced that it will make its programming language Swift open source.

Now, Apple has fulfilled its promise and open sourced this language used to write apps for iOS, OS X, and watchOS. The Swift language has been open sourced under the Apache License. This means, developers will get an access to a full set of tools.

In Apple’s words, “Swift is a high-performance system programming language. It has a clean and modern syntax, and offers seamless access to existing C and Objective-C code and frameworks, and is memory safe (by default).”

Apple introduced Swift programming language at WWDC in 2104 and called it the best language to code Apple platform apps. At the same event, Apple wished to open source the language as it would grow to become “the next big programming language”.



Now outside developers will be able to learn more about Swift and contribute to its development. Expanding Swift to the new platforms, Apple has released a new version that works on Linux.

Apple has set up website Swift.org with the following message:

Welcome to the Swift community. Together we are working to build a better programming language for everyone.

Here’s the GitHub page of Swift: https://github.com/apple