Honza Dvorsky How was it promised at the WWDC developer conference in June this year, yesterday Apple published the source code programming language Swift on the new portal swift.org. Libraries for both OS X and Linux have also been released together, so developers on that platform can start using Swift from day one.
Support for other platforms will already be in the hands of the open-source community, where anyone with sufficient knowledge can contribute to the project and add support for Windows or other versions of Linux.
The future of Swift is in the hands of the entire community
However, not only the source code is public. Apple is also switching to complete openness in development itself, when it is moving to an open-source environment on GitHub. Here, the entire team from Apple, together with volunteers, will develop Swift into the future, where the plan is to release Swift 2016 in the spring of 2.2, Swift 3 next fall.
This strategy is the exact opposite of the previous approach, where as developers we got a new Swift once a year at WWDC and for the rest of the year we had no idea what direction the language would take. Newly, Apple has published proposals and plans for the future that it offers for criticism and feedback from developers, so that whenever a developer has a question or suggestion for improvement, Swift can directly influence it.
Jak explained Craig Federighi, head of software development at Apple, is open-sourced the Swift compiler, LLDB debugger, REPL environment, and the language's standard and core libraries. Apple recently introduced Swift Package Manager, which is a program for sharing projects between developers and easily dividing large projects into smaller ones.
Projects work similarly Cocoapods a Carthage, which developers on Apple platforms have been working with for years, but here it seems that Apple wants to offer an alternative approach to sharing source code. For now, this is a project "in its infancy", but with the help of volunteers, it will surely grow quickly.
Open-source trend of big companies
Apple is not the first big company to publish its initially closed language to the open-source world. A year ago, Microsoft made a similar move when opened the resource large parts of the .NET libraries. Similarly, Google periodically publishes parts of the source code of the Android operating system.
But Apple has really raised the bar even higher, because instead of just publishing Swift code, the team has moved all development to GitHub, where it actively collaborates with volunteers. This move is a strong indicator that Apple really cares about the community's ideas and isn't just trying to go with the source publishing trend.
This step moves Apple to the level of one of the most open big companies today, dare I say even more than Microsoft and Google. At least in this direction. Now we can only hope that this move will pay off for Apple and that it will not regret it.
What does it mean?
The reason developers on Apple platforms are completely and uniformly excited about this move is the much wider application of their knowledge of Swift. With strong support for Linux, which runs on most servers in the world, many mobile developers can become server developers as they will now be able to write servers in Swift as well. Personally, I am very much looking forward to the possibility of using the same language both for the server and for mobile and desktop applications.
Another reason Apple open sourced Swift was mentioned by Craig Federighi. According to him, everyone should write in this language for the next 20 years. There are already voices celebrating Swift as an excellent language for beginners to learn, so maybe one day we will see the first lesson in school where newbies will study Swift instead of Java.
https://developer.ibm.com/swift/