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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Pessimism - Thursday, December 3, 2015 - link
Key differentiator: Microsoft put forth the effort to bring .NET Core to Linux AND MAC, Apple conveniently only bothered to port Swift to Linux and left Windows out in the cold.jasonelmore - Thursday, December 3, 2015 - link
Then that's their mistake. it will never be taken seriously in enterprise.extide - Thursday, December 3, 2015 - link
X2, this language will be used for little more than silly little games and simple apps.chaynes89 - Thursday, December 3, 2015 - link
Some of those silly little games are bringing in over $90k per dayIntervenator - Friday, December 4, 2015 - link
Those silly games and simple apps bring in 10B a year for Apple alone. You should think about why X2 was created, rather than look down on it for what it was created for.DanNeely - Thursday, December 3, 2015 - link
While they're happy to sell to big businesses, Apple's repeatedly shown they don't really care about the enterprise market.ComeOnNow - Wednesday, May 17, 2017 - link
Enterprise isn't even a tech thing. It's a business construct. It's irrelevant what IT thinks about the product it chooses to support--none of that is used by anyone changing anything anyway (in tech) it's just business that is affected and tech only indirectly. MSFT isn't so much a tech company, but an aggregator and reseller. They have invented or pioneered almost nothing that was successful. Are you new to tech?eoerl - Thursday, December 3, 2015 - link
LLVM back end, shouldn't be rocket science to have it working on windows if any big player is interested. It merely recognises the fact that in the short term on windows nobody caresKoolAidMan1 - Saturday, December 5, 2015 - link
Do you have any idea how much programming happens on Linux and OS X?This aren't clerical duties we're talking about
easp - Monday, December 7, 2015 - link
Its hard to take anyone seriously who makes such self-important declarations.Also, consider that maybe apple has a big partner who will handle the enterprise-side.