Apple's Swift programming language is going open source

Swift is a multi-paradigm, compiled programming language created by Apple Inc. for iOS and OS X development. Introduced at Apple's 2014 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), Swift is designed to work with Apple's Cocoa and Cocoa Touchframeworks and the large body of existing Objective-C code written for Apple products. Swift is intended to be more resilient to erroneous code ("safer") than Objective-C, and also more concise. It is built with the LLVM compiler framework included in Xcode 6, and uses the Objective-C runtime, allowing C, Objective-C, C++ and Swift code to run within a single program

Last year, Apple introduced Swift, its very own programming language, which was focused on making it easier to build apps. Now, in a bid to make it more palatable to developers, Apple is making another big move: It's making Swift open source. That'll give developers full access to all of Swift's inner workings, and it might even tempt over people who were worried about adopting a proprietary Apple language. "We think Swift is the next big programming language, the one that we'll all be doing application and system programming on for 20 years to come," Apple's SVP of software engineering, Craig Federighi, said during WWDC today. "We think Swift should be everywhere and used by everyone." The language is also getting some upgrades this year with Swift 2, which includes support for new optimization technology, protocol extensions and much shorter compile times.