Swift is Apple's own software development platform for the Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch designed to make coding apps easier. The Swift platform was introduced a year ago, and now Apple is making it open source, which means developers will be able to get under the hood, so to speak, and may make it more enticing to people who were afraid to work in a proprietary system.
Apple giving Swift to the open source community
Apple made the announcement during its annual Worldwide Developer Conference keynote presentation monday morning. Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of Software Engineering said, "We think Swift is the next big programming language. The one that we'll all be doing application and system programming on for 20 years to come."
He added, "We think Swift should be everywhere and used by everyone."
Dropping Swift into the open source community is a big move towards making it available to everyone, everywhere.
Mr. Federighi said Apple is making protocol extensions available to developers, and that the Swift compiler and standard libraries for OS X, iOS, and Linux will be available in the open source community by the end of the year.