Apple followed through on its Worldwide Developer Conference promise to make its Swift coding platform open source. The Mac and iPad maker launched a new Swift website where developers can access the compiler code for Swift, and find resources for working with its app development tools.
Apple's Swift, now with open source goodness
Swift is the development platform Apple created for creating Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch apps. Apple 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."
With key parts of Swift now available to the open source community will likely give developers more confidence in the platform since it doesn't rely entirely on Apple for support. Open sourcing the platform means developers can participate in making Swift better overall, too. Should Apple ever decide to abandon Swift, developers can continue to use the software development environment because it'll still have community support.
The open source elements include the compiler, elements from Foundation, and the standard library.
Developers can check out Swift's open source elements at the new Swift website.