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

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.)

Comments

Quite possible

[fyngyrz]

The specification may be open (or not); that does not mean that the code that creates the language interpreter or compiler is open.

In this case, it is. That's laudable, at least in the broadest sense.

As for the remark that Swift is "growing faster than anything else we can track" in TFA, well, okay, but grass grows faster than redwoods, too, but that doesn't mean it's going to get as tall. :)

Re:I can't decide!

[__aaclcg7560]

If you're Apple-centric, learn Swift. If you're Windows-centric, learn C#. Otherwise, learn Python for all platforms.

Re:OK, I'll bite

[SoftwareArtist]

I haven't used it, just read a lot of the documentation, but it looks like a pretty nicely designed language. It has a very modern feel: concise syntax, static typing with type inference, closures, everything is an object, etc. Certainly looks much nicer to work in than C++.

For any question about, "Can you do...", the answer is almost certainly yes. It's the recommended language for nearly all new development on iOS and Mac OS, so it's being used for all those things.