Apple has announced a major new version of Swift, making it faster and adding new developer features.
Swift will also be open-source for iOS, OS X and Linux.
Apple will explain more about the future of Swift, Apple’s programming language, during sessions later in the week at WWDC.
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Open source? WHY ? What a huge mistake!
With Steve Jobs this wouldn’t have happened for sure.
Swift should be exclusive to Apple. Why going open source ?
Because more programmers, DUH!
SO MORE people reap the benefit’s of the platform to create. I think it’s a great idea.
What a sheep-ish and entitled response. Be more close minded…
Actually, this is great news for everyone who does development in the real world.
Soon IDEs from Jetbrains and others will support Swift for multiple platforms such as Windows, Android and Linux. I wouldn’t be too surprised if Swift became a first class language for VisualStudio.
Finally Oracle’s terrible stewardship of Java will be challenged in a way that they will have to innovate, or watch Java die.
Another language (in addition to Java) that will feel the pressure of open source Swift is Python.
For decades Python has been a “learner’s language” which has stuck around in many areas because people already knew it. Well, Swift is every bit as well designed as Python, but has the added advantage of Playgrounds which coders gives immediate, actionable feedback which is vital to keeping learners engaged. Also, because Swift is a C-family language, what people learn from Swift is more portable to languages broadly used in the real world, including C#, Java, Javascript. Once Swift is available on PCs and Chromebooks, Swift will make way more sense than Python to be the first language people learn.
Eventually, Swift could conceivably be used as TypeScript or CoffeeScript are, to shield logical minds from the stupid parts of Javascript.
Time will tell, but I don’t see open source Swift hurting Apple at all, and certainly don’t think Steve Jobs would have objected.
But Swift is still only for Apple ecosystem, even if you can develop on other platforms, right? Meaning, you can only create iOS, watchOS and OS X apps with it. With Python you can create for all different kinds of platforms, including Windows. So I’m not sure about this. If Swift would be able to create Windows apps too, then it would definitely become a huge language in the programming world.
Obj-C doh
I here for it.