Phoenix Is Trying To Be An Open Version Of Apple's Swift

Apple unveiled the Swift programming language at this year's WWDC event but sadly it's still not clear whether Apple will "open up" the language to let it appear on non-Apple platforms. Swift is built atop LLVM and designed to be Apple's successor to Objective-C in many regards while suppoorting C/Obj-C/Obj-C++ all within a single program. With non-Apple folks being interested in the language, it didn't take long before an open-source project started up around it.

Ind.ie has today announced their Phoenix project that aims to be a free and open version of Apple's Swift programming language. The work is being led by Greg Casamento who is also the leader of GNUStep, the common open-source implementation of Apple's Cocoa frameworks.

The code that was opened up today by this independent Swift project doesn't do much at this time and they just label it a sneak peak -- so far it just seems to be working on its parsing of Swift code, but they say to expect updates shortly.

The Phoenix site is just starting off and also lacks many details, though does issue a public letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook in trying to persuade him to open up Swift itself. Swift was initially developed by LLVM founder Chris Lattner and other Apple compiler folks, which so far don't know whether Swift will be an open language.

For those not familiar with the Swift language, there's a decent overview via Wikipedia.