Apple To Open-Source & Support Linux With Its Swift Programming Language

Besides announcing OS X El Capitan, Apple announced today from their WWDC event that their Swift programming language will be open-sourced and they intend to support it on Linux too.

Swift is the programming language they announced last year that's designed by Chris Lattner, the lead developer of LLVM. Swift uses LLVM for its compiler stack so it's not too much of a surprise that Apple will be working to get Swift on Linux systems. Swift has been inspired by Objective-C, Rust, Haskell, Python, C#, and other languages. Chris has been working on it since 2010 and finally Apple is planning to open-source it by the end of 2015.

Previously, Chris and others at Apple working on LLVM said they didn't know if Swift would be open-sourced so it's good to see Apple now make up its mind. Beyond OS X and iOS support, Apple will be bringing it to Linux, but no word on whether they'll be officially trying to bring it to other operating systems -- like Windows -- where LLVM is also supported.

Apple also announced that version 2.0 of Swift will be coming this year.