Apple developers will be glad to know that Swift has become open source as of version 2.2. Swift is a programming language that was developed by Chris Lattner with the eventual contribution of programmers at Apple. Swift took language ideas from Objetive-C, Rust, Haskell, Ruby, Python, C#, CLU etc and is said to be more resilient to erroneous code as compared to Objective C. 

Swift was a proprietary language till recently when the version 2.2 was open sourced by Apple under the Apache License 2.0. A repository has been created which allows anyone to peek into its inner workings over the Swift Github repo. As part of this launch, a new site was created called Swift.org that is devoted to support the Swift open source initiative and it's developers.  

Swift.org provides developers with features such as:

  • A bug reporting and tracking system
  • Mailing lists
  • A blog dedicated to the engineering of Swift
  • Community guidelines
  • Getting started tutorials
  • Contributing instructions
  • Documentation on Swift
  • Developer and API design guidelines

Overall, releasing Swift to the open source community will allow it to gain greater support from more companies and developers.