Apple has recently announced that their programming language for Apple devices, Swift, is now open source.
Alongside the open source release, Apple unveiled Swift.org. This website serves as an introduction to the average or the experienced public to the world of the user-friendly Swift. Swift.org offers download sources for OS X and Ubuntu 15.10 and 14.04, as well as instructions on how to begin with Swift. From the website, users have access to Apple’s blog, starter tips, source code, compiler, and community.
Apple seems to be focusing on bringing the development world to a wider audience.
Swift is a more user friendly language than the previous default for Apple products, Objective-C, which Apple is trying to prove to the community with its maintainability and efficiency. Swift does more for less when compared to Objective-C and is ultimately faster because of Swift’s improvements under the hood.
What could this mean for Apple? It is apparent that Apple is attempting to encourage more developers from every experience level to hop on board with their creation. There is opportunity to profit in iOS projects already. And with the open source release of Swift, there are potential benefits for developers and Apple itself: By making Swift open source, users worldwide can immediately learn without too much difficulty. By giving the user freedom, Apple can expect a boost in the popularity of their development tools.
