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Apple Releases Swift As an Open-Source Project (swift.org)

Posted by timothy on from the well-that's-quick dept.

jcr writes with the news that Apple's Swift has gone open source: From Apple's press release: "We are excited by this new chapter in the story of Swift. After Apple unveiled the Swift programming language, it quickly became one of the fastest growing languages in history. Swift makes it easy to write software that is incredibly fast and safe by design. Now that Swift is open source, you can help make the best general purpose programming language available everywhere." It's listed at Apple's GitHub repository, too. (Hat tip to Jono Bacon.)

6 of 195 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Something missing here... by jcr · · Score: 4, Informative

    I've heard that Microsoft is working on a Swift compiler, but I haven't heard what their schedule is supposed to be.

    -jcr

    --
    The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
  2. Re:Now what about the other open promises? by BasilBrush · · Score: 3, Informative

    FaceTime was encumbered by patents Apple don't own. So until they expire, it's not going to be open source.

    As to Swift - they only announced it was going open source at WWDC this summer. So no, not years. It's not even years old yet.

    And by the way, a lot of slashdotter's cynicism that Swift would not be open sourced is hereby proved wrong.

  3. RTFA; it's Apache 2 by tepples · · Score: 4, Informative

    I read the featured article, and it turns out to be Apache License 2.0.

  4. Re:Something missing here... by Moridineas · · Score: 3, Informative

    Since OSX is based on the Mach Kernel and uses a lot of BSD utilities, in many ways both OSX and Linux are Unix.

    Fully agreed, but to be pedantically accurate (the best kind of accurate) only OS X is UNIX (as in authorized to use the UNIX Trademark).

    I found it extremely easy to port a Linux based CUPS printer driver to OSX

    Should be! Apple employes several CUPS developers and purchased the source code about a decade ago.

  5. Re:OK, I'll bite by serviscope_minor · · Score: 5, Informative

    and what is there to gain for an old school C programmer who doesn't particularly enjoy C++ ?

    SWIFT is more or less ObjectiveC made sane. It's basically the same underlying world view, but with a new language with a unified syntax (where as ObjC is like two unrelated languaged bolted together), reduced undefined behaviour, no pointer arithmetic (by default? not sure. Pounters aren't exposed in the same way).

    ObjC and so Swift are both very late bound languages, so have a very dynamic feel to them.

    --
    SJW n. One who posts facts.
  6. Re:Something missing here... by ArcadioAlivioSincero · · Score: 5, Informative

    RemObjects makes a free Swift compiler that targets .NET, and thus the binaries would run on Windows. It targets Android too, so you can do Swift on Android as well.

    Of course, none of the OSX/iOS frameworks are provided on non-Mac platforms. You're expected to to use the frameworks already provided by the platform you are targetting.