AppleApple brought out the big guns, from CEO Tim Cook to musical performer Drake, but perhaps the loudest reaction at the company's Worldwide Developers' Conference Monday in San Francisco resulted from news that the Swift programming language is being open sourced.
"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," said Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering who in addition to discussing Swift introduced Apple's iOS 9 developments.
He said Swift's compiler and libraries for iOS, OS X, and Linux will be available via an open-source license by year end.
Swift 2 is available to developers in an iOS 9 beta today and Apple says it boasts new features and improvements that produce faster apps.
In addition to favorable reaction from the Apple crowd at WWDC, the Swift news generated positive responses on social media as well.
As cool as open source Swift is, it shouldn't be surprising. If a new language is going to be successful today, there isn't a choice.
— Eric Hayes (@ehayes) June 8, 2015
That's got to be the biggest announcement of all of WWDC. Apple makes Swift, Open Source.
— Pipezillian (@andypiper) June 8, 2015Apple introduced Swift at last year's WWDC, providing developers with a way to build apps for both iOS and Mac OS devices.
A recent survey by Stack Overflow showed that programmers love Swift even if many aren't yet using it.
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