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Apple today announced that its Swift programming language is now officially open source.

As an open source language, the broad community of talented developers â€” from app developers to educational institutions to enterprises â€” can contribute to new Swift features and optimizations and help bring Swift to new computing platforms. Introduced in 2014, Swift is the fastest growing programming language in history and combines the performance and efficiency of compiled languages with the simplicity and interactivity of popular scripting languages. Apple today also launched the Swift.org website with detailed information about Swift open source, including technical documentation, community resources and links to download the Swift source code.

Hair Force Oneâ€œBy making Swift open source the entire developer community can contribute to the programming language and help bring it to even more platforms,â€ said Craig “Hair Force One” Federighi, Appleâ€™s senior vice president of Software Engineering, in a statement. â€œSwiftâ€™s power and ease of use will inspire a new generation to get into coding, and with todayâ€™s announcement theyâ€™ll be able to take their ideas anywhere, from mobile devices to the cloud.â€

Swift is a powerful and intuitive programming language that gives developers the freedom and capabilities they need to create the next generation of cutting-edge software. Swift is easy to learn and use, even if youâ€™ve never coded before, and it’s the first systems programming language that is as expressive and enjoyable as a scripting language. Designed for safety, Swift also eliminates entire categories of common programming errors.

The Swift open source code is available via GitHub and includes support for all Apple software platforms â€” iOS, OS X, watchOS and tvOS â€” as well as for Linux. Components available include the Swift compiler, debugger, standard library, foundation libraries, package manager and REPL. Swift is licensed under the popular Apache 2.0 open source license with a runtime library exception, enabling users to easily incorporate Swift into their own software and port the language to new platforms.

Source: Apple Inc.

After Apple open sources it, IBM puts Swift programming in the cloud
By Kevin Tofel for Mobile Platforms-- ZDNet -- December 4, 2015 -- 15:38 GMT
IBM has already put the Linux port of Apple's Swift programming language to good use, releasing the IBM Swift Sandbox: A way to code in the cloud.
That didn't take long: As soon as Apple released its Swift programming language to the open source community, IBM created a way to code with Swift in the cloud.
Big Blue released its IBM Swift Sandbox that runs your Swift code on a Linux server using a Docker container.
No, you're not going to create the next big Swift program in the Sandbox, but for those wanting to get their feet wet with Apple's newest object oriented programming language, the IBM Swift Sandbox is worth the look.
And it underscores IBM's continued partnership with Apple.
The company is on-board to create enterprise apps for iOS devices and is already saving thousands of dollars in support costs by deploying Apple hardware within its own ranks. IBM says "we love swift here" so I'd expect the company to highlight additional Swift implementations in the future, helping Apple further its cause to make Swift a go-to language for modern app development.
Perhaps best of all, by putting a Swift environment in the cloud, you can use the language on any device running a modern browser.
I whipped a few lines of code together in Safari on the iPad Pro - my full time computing device - and was able to run them without a problem or any lag. The text editor highlights common code errors just as you'd expect in an Integrated Development Environment or code creation tool.
That's super useful in a classroom setting where students can tinker with Swift to learn app development.