APPLE HAS ANNOUNCED that its Swift programming
language is going open source, supporting iOS, OS X and Linux. In
other news, hell has frozen over. Swift 2 made its debut during Apple's Worldwide Developer
Conference (WWDC) on Monday, with the
first version programming language making its debut during last
year's keynote.
Swift 2 brings with it a bunch of new features for Apple
developers, including error handling, protocol extensions, Apple's
Xcode integrated development environment and new optimization
technology, Federighi told the crowd.
The most notable announcement however was that Swift is going open
source, in a huge move for Apple that sees it following in the
footsteps of its increasingly open source rivals Google and
Microsoft.
Craig Federighi, senior vice president of Software Engineering at
Apple revealed that the language's compiler and libraries will become
available under an open source license by the end of the year.
What's more, as well as being available on iOS and OS X, Apple is
also releasing developer tools for Linux, meaning writing apps for
Apple platforms will no longer require owning an Apple device.
Federighi 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. We think Swift should be
everywhere and used by everyone."
Apple has traditionally resisted open sourcing because it can lead
to software fragmentation, but this U-turn likely will see the
language gets faster and slicker with developers able to contribute
improvements.
The move to open source also means that we'll likely soon
see Swift applications running on non-Apple platforms, and it
could manage to tempt developers who were concerned about
adopting a proprietary Apple language.
Swift 2 is available to registered Apple developers now.
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