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Apple Keeps Its Promise, Swift is Open Source

Last summer, Apple released its own programming language Swift. This is equally we intended for beginners to experienced programmers, in order to create complex systems. This solves the Swift Objective-C previously used for creating applications for Mac OS X and iOS as the primary language from, although by his own admission Objective C is not threatened by Swift. This will continue to be supported and maintained by Apple.

Apple Keeps Its Promise, Swift is Open Source

The reasons for the change of paradigm seem clear: simpler, faster, more secure. Used functions that come from scripting languages ​​and functional programming. The language contains as well many modern concepts, but also relies on well-known techniques.

In early June of this year it was announced then to the in-house developer conference WWDC (Worldwide Developers Conference), version 2.0 of the language. This should be up to seven times faster and, to the great surprise of many, open source. In plain language this means that Apple puts the source code of its programming language and open under the Apache 2.0 License represents whereby Swift freely used in any environment, may be modified and distributed. Also cross-platform apps could arise so easily.

Yesterday, the company then his promise sparked from Cupertino and made the source code of programming to the public. Craig Federighi, the senior vice president of software development at Apple, eulogized in an interview with The Next Web, Apple was convinced that Swift is the next big programming in the coming decades.

“We think Swift is the next major programming language; the one people are going to be programming in for the coming several decades. We think it’s a combination of it being a great systems and apps programming language that’s fast and safe, but also being really expressive and easy to learn.“

Apple turns up for the first time the hosting platform for software projects to Github, which strongly suggests that the iPhone maker is significantly stronger for its open source software on Contributions from the community. In addition, belonging to the project page has Swift.org created, prepared on the Apple now many details of programming, including the documentation and instructions for polling provides.

The judge is therefore also planned to give programmers from the community the right to independently alter the sources of Swift. Swift will be further developed as an open "evolutionary process". How far Swift thus may separate from the hands and control of Apple, remains to be seen.

Furthermore, Apple has also introduced a port of Swift for Linux. On the page Swift.org therefore find the first one Swift-version for Linux, in source and binary form for Ubuntu.

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