In news that will please developers around the world, Apple has fulfilled its promise earlier this year and has made its Swift programming language open source.
The company, which introduced Swift during its 2014 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in 2014, until which the company’s Xcode IDE and Objective-C were used to create apps.
With the release of Swift as an open source programming language, Apple expects that new users will contribute to the language as it matures in time.
To coincide with the open source launch, Apple has published a port for Linux computers – Linux users can download pre-built binaries for Ubuntu.
One of the advantages the language offers over other programming languages is the Playgrounds concept, which allows developers to modify code without needing to recompile to see the result.
Apple first introduced OS X’s new programming language to concerns over how ‘open’ the language would be, yet now the company has fulfilled its earlier promise, and is encouraging contributors to assist in making Swift a better programming language.
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