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Apple makes a Swift shift to open-source
Apple is open-sourcing its Swift programming language in a bid to make it more pervasive. The Swift language’s compiler and iOS, OS X and Linux libraries will be made available under an open-source license by the end of the year, said Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, at the company’s 2015 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC).
Swift was first unveiled last year as a language for writing iOS and Mac apps. The language works in Apple’s Xcode integrated development environment and its Cocoa and Cocoa Touch frameworks.
“Swift is the next big programming language, the one that we’ll all be doing application and system programming on for 20 years to come,” said Federighi . “We think Swift should be everywhere and used by everyone.”
Which is why Apple is now making it available for everyone.
On its website, Apple says Swift is the successor to the C and Objective-C coding languages, thanks to its support for object-oriented programming and whole module optimization. And developers seem to agree, at least according to a recent Stack Overflow survey, which showed Swift has the highest percentage of developers who are currently using it and want to continue using it. The language also appears in the top twenty of the Tiobe Index, a list of the world’s most widely used languages.
Even so, the move is a curious one for Apple, which has been considerably less keen than other big tech companies like Google, Facebook and even Microsoft when it comes to open-sourcing its technologies.
However, that thinking has begun to change, stressed Al Hilwa, an analyst with International Data Corporation (IDC) in an interview with ComputerWorld. He said the company has conceded “open source, and a strategy that will send Swift to other platforms, is a path to better adoption.”
The obvious benefits for taking the open-source route include gaining more visibility and goodwill in the development community. It’s the same reason why Microsoft has decided to open-source several key pieces of its infrastructure like its .Net framework after years of resistance.
Clearly, Apple wants Swift to be used by more people than just Apple. By making it open-source, the language could well be ported to platforms like Windows in future.
Photo Credit: Sean Church via Compfight cc
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