Apple’s Swift programming language turns open-source

Apple has made its Swift coding language available for the public.

The second major iteration of Swift was revealed in June at WWDC, where Apple also announced that it would be making the code open-source by the close of 2015.

That time has now come, with a new website also launched alongside Swift 2.0’s transition into free availability.

Swift.org will include systems for bug reporting, mailing lists, an engineering blog, tutorials and API guidelines.

Swift has been released under an Apache 2.0 license, the same foundation used for the open-sourced portion of Microsoft’s .NET framework, which was launched last year.

Those wishing to dig into the code can find it on GitHub, with the project including the compiler, LLDB debugger, REPL command-line environment, and standard and core libraries.

Swift’s Package Manager has been introduced, allowing modules to be collected in a single place – Apple says that it will evolve in response to future community feedback.

Swift 3.0 has also been detailed ahead of its release, with Apple mapping out the major changes set for the version change.

These include source compatibility, allowing code to compile even if the language changes in the future. This is not something that currently exists in 2.0, with Apple issuing a caution to developers to expect technological hiccups when moving up to 3.0.