Apple kept to the promise of making its hugely popular programming language, Swift open source, allowing anyone to download, modify and to share the changes as they deem wise. While the promise was made months ago, and everyone expecting it, the stymied excitement was tied to the humorous unavailability of the codes on GitHub on launch day.

Swift has been in development for many years, and supports modern programming conventions, such as closures, generics, type inference, multiple return types and namespaces.

It's not only faster, but also easier to learn, and to help that process, Apple has created an 'interactive playground' for developers. And it's all good news, since the code is no longer locked up behind prohibitive licenses, the code-base is freed up for developers to use.

The company is hoping Swift will inspire the new generation to get into coding, and be able to take their ideas anywhere, from mobile devices to maybe even the cloud.

Meanwhile, with the project now open source, means that developers can choose to bring it to Windows and Android.

Developers will be able to download Swift and start building things with it from the new website: Swift.org, albeit, it won't be able to build apps that go into the App Store.

Swift supposedly faster than Objective-C, also with built-in protections against common issues and errors, currently supports iOS and OS X apps, and can also be used for tvOS and watchOS apps.

Swift Programming Language now open source; What's the big deal?

Apple kept to the promise of making its hugely popular programming language, Swift open source, allowing anyone to download, modify and to share the changes as they deem wise. While the promise was made months ago, and everyone expecting it, the stymied excitement was tied to the humorous unavailability of the codes on GitHub on launch day.

Swift has been in development for many years, and supports modern programming conventions, such as closures, generics, type inference, multiple return types and namespaces.

It's not only faster, but also easier to learn, and to help that process, Apple has created an 'interactive playground' for developers. And it's all good news, since the code is no longer locked up behind prohibitive licenses, the code-base is freed up for developers to use.

The company is hoping Swift will inspire the new generation to get into coding, and be able to take their ideas anywhere, from mobile devices to maybe even the cloud.

Meanwhile, with the project now open source, means that developers can choose to bring it to Windows and Android.

Developers will be able to download Swift and start building things with it from the new website: Swift.org, albeit, it won't be able to build apps that go into the App Store.

Swift supposedly faster than Objective-C, also with built-in protections against common issues and errors, currently supports iOS and OS X apps, and can also be used for tvOS and watchOS apps.