14 DAY TRIAL // Today, December 3, Apple has published a press release to inform users that the Swift programming language is now an open source product, available for Ubuntu Linux and Mac OS X operating systems.
It's not the first time we hear Apple talking about making its award-winning Swift programming language open source, as the Cupertino company revealed this piece of information back in June, during the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2015 event that took place in San Francisco, USA, at the Moscone West Center.
Apple believes that if Swift is now an open source programming language, developers from all over the world will start contributing to it in order to make it more powerful and available for even more platforms. Swift was first announced by Apple back in 2014, but now it appears to be one of the fastest-growing programming languages in history.
"By making Swift open source the entire developer community can contribute to the programming language and help bring it to even more platforms," said Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering. "Swift’s power and ease of use will inspire a new generation to get into coding, and with today’s announcement they’ll be able to take their ideas anywhere, from mobile devices to the cloud."
Swift 2.2 now available on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and Ubuntu 15.10
For those of you who are not in the loop, we will take the opportunity to inform you that Swift is an innovative programming language. It was initially designed by Apple for its Mac OS X and iOS operating systems, providing application developers with a compact yet expressive syntax that helps them build lightning-fast apps.
The latest version of the Swift programming language is 2.2, and it makes writing code easy as pie. According to the project's website, you can download binary packages of Swift 2.2 for the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) and Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) operating systems. However, please note that these are Development Snapshots and are not official releases, which means that they shouldn't be used in production systems.