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Apple Takes Swift Open Source

Apple's Swift programming language is now open source. The company has published the Swift language, supporting libraries, debugger and package manager under the Apache 2.0 license with a runtime library exception, and created a Swift.org site with information, technical documentation, community resources and links to download the source code.

"By making Swift open source the entire developer community can contribute to the programming language and help bring it to even more platforms," said Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering, in a press release. "Swift's power and ease of use will inspire a new generation to get into coding, and with today's announcement they'll be able to take their ideas anywhere, from mobile devices to the cloud."

App developers now can access the code, add new features and optimizations, and contribute back to the project. Apple remains the project lead, working closely with technical leaders from the Swift development community. A core team of engineers (currently composed of Apple employees) is responsible for strategic direction, and a collection of code owners are responsible for day-to-day management of specific areas of the project.

The Swift open source code, including support for all Apple software platforms as well as Linux, is available via GitHub. Available components include the Swift compiler, debugger, standard library, foundation libraries, package manager and REPL.

For more information, visit the Swift.org site.

About the Author

Rhea Kelly is editor in chief for Campus Technology, THE Journal, and Spaces4Learning. She can be reached at [email protected].

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