Apple’s Swift programming language becomes open source and gets a new version

Apple is releasing a new version of Swift, the programming language it introduced last year. In addition, the software will be open source, so that other manufacturers can also adopt the programming language.

Apple did not go into great detail about new functionality in Swift 2 during its presentation at the WWDC developer conference in San Francisco. The main difference from the earlier Swift version is that the compiler and libraries for OS X, iOS and Linux are open-source. turn into. This allows third parties to port the libraries themselves to other platforms, such as Windows.

Third parties could also build a compiler that makes software written in Swift suitable for other platforms. The software will already be released in the ‘coming weeks’, although it is not yet known under which license that will happen. It’s also unclear whether Apple will keep the development of Swift entirely in its own hands, or whether the open source community will also be involved. Whether independent developers will integrate the programming language will also depend on this.

In addition, Swift should receive support for protocol extensions, an error handling model will be introduced and the markdown markup language can be used in comments. Also, the debug mode should be faster. A conversion tool will be available for software written in Swift 1.2.