Apple’s Swift programming language just went open source.
And that can’t help but be awesome for the developer community.
Apple has announced that Swift has gone open source, Apple releasing two additional projects for Swift in open source: the Core Libraries project, and a new Swift Package Manager project.
The Swift Package Manager is a brand new project that strives to create a powerful, user-friendly tool to build and share Swift code. We are focused on ensuring the package manager is great at sharing source code, rather than compiled binary libraries. This project is very early in development, and will be designed and developed using Swift’s open, collaborative process.
Developers can find example package repositories at the Apple home on GitHub, as well as the source code and additional information for the package manager itself.
Where the Core Libraries project is concerned, this is a higher-level set of APIs, above the Swift standard library. These libraries offer functionality such as localization, networking primitives, unit testing, user preferences, and more. These libraries also introduce coding conventions that will be useful as you write more Swift code, and create new packages.
The core libraries are based on frameworks included in Apple platforms, namely Foundation, libdispatch, and XCTest. The Swift open source versions of these frameworks are intended to make it easy to use the same Swift code with consistent functionality across multiple platforms.
So, you’ll have to dive neck-deep into the technical end of things, but this just made an enormous array of developer tools available for free.
And that’s never a bad thing.