Apple takes open-source route with Swift 2

June 09, 2015 at 16:05 IST | 2 Minute Read

by Amarjeet Singh Mudhar

Apple announced many new features and performance improvements for major upgrades of OS X and iOS at WWDC 2015. Apple also released Apple Music. But that's not all to it. The Cupertino Company also announced Swift 2.

Swift is Apple's own proprietary programming language for OS X and iOS development. They released it last year at WWDC 2014. Since then, the language has evolved a lot. Its got lot of love from developers as it is easy to code with as well as its faster in compile time than many other languages like python.

Apple decided to enhance it to such an extent that in just one year it got its verison bumped up to 2. So what's new? Maybe you as a consumer wouldn't want to read all that detailed technical information, so here's the big news. Apple will make Swift 2.0 open-source by the end of this year. Not only that, it will also be available on linux operating system.

Asking how will that affect your experience?

1. Open-Source

   By announcing Swift 2 to be open-source, Apple allowed developers to fork into source code of the language. This will make it a community driven language, so developer(Non-Apple) will be able to propose their own code to add more features in language. Swift source code will be released under an OSI-approved permissive license. Hence, expect more efficient and snappier apps for your iOS as well as OS X devices.

2. Availability on Linux

   Earlier Swift compiler was only available on OS X. Therefore, developers required an Apple computer to do any development for OS X or iOS. Get excited as now Swift compiler will be available on linux operting system which leads to more innovative apps in Apple App store.

   Good news for Android lovers is that iOS apps will be easy to port to Android as it is also based on linux and because of that you'll not have to wait so long for some games and apps.