Apple Open Sources SWIFT

During Apple’s worldwide developer conference, they announced that their new programming language SWIFT would be open sourced before the end of 2015. With less than a month to go Apple made good on that promise and released the open source code. How they did it surprised apple watchers and the general tech press.

myphpnet1Unlike the open sourcing of OSX, which is released as dump every time a new version is released, this was released on Github. This is the first time Apple has released any of their software on an online repository like github. In addition the entire revision history has also been uploaded, so you can see every commit going back to the inception of the language and by whom. Apple has also published a roadmap for SWIFT on the github. The future features show all the way up to version three including point releases along the way.

The best part of how this was open sourced is that now developers who code their iOS apps using SWIFT could eventually use some of that code for web apps. This is very useful because at present, a developer would write a phone app in one language and then be forced to write the web app component (usually for browser based access to the same app) using a different language. This involves heavy duplication of work.

This is a bold new step for Apple and bodes well for the developers in their ecosystem.