The open-source Swift programming language first pioneered by Apple Inc. has risen to become the 10th most popular of all languages, according to an analysis by TIOBE Software BV, a company that specializes in assessing and tracking the quality of software

Swift, which was open-sourced in 2015, claims numerous advantages over more established programming languages including safety, speed and approachable syntax. The language also combines modern features like garbage collection, a form of automatic memory management, and type safety with readability and documentation.

TIOBE Software, which has maintained its list of popular programming languages since 2001, uses aggregated data from more than 25 search engines to come up with its rankings. A separate ranking called the PYPL Index, which uses data from Google Trends, also ranks Swift in the No. 10 ten spot. In addition, Swift ranks as the most popular language that’s being actively developed on GitHub.

But although Swift has broken into the top ten, TIOBE casts doubts on whether it can go much further. It says that most legacy macOS and iOS code is still written in the Objective-C programming language, and is being maintained rather than migrated.

Because Swift is primarily designed for writing iOS and MacOS applications, TIOBE said it’s unlikely to see much more growth.

However, Swift could yet gain further impetus from companies like IBM Corp. and PerfectlySoft Inc., both of which see potential to become a server-side language outside of Apple’s ecosystem. Those companies both cite its ability to run with a modest memory footprint, which should make it less expensive to run at scale on cloud infrastructure than other options such as Java or Node.js. There’s also the outside chance that Google might decided to support Swift for Android application development, which would likely result in a massive surge of interest.

Outside of established languages like Java, C, and C++, Swift’s main rival appears to be Go, which was open-sourced by Google back in 2012 and is also seeing rising adoption. Another language rising in popularity is C#. The language is mainly used by Windows platform developers, but could benefit from Microsoft’s recent cross-platform push.

Swift is also set to get a major update later this year. The most important new feature promised in Swift 4 is ABI compatibility, which should deliver greater stability and entice more developers into the fold.

Image: Swift