Apple’s Swift Programming language made open source

By Andre Revilla Published June 8, 2015

Apple has announced at todays World Developer Conference that it will be launching version 2.0 of its Swift programing language, as well as the huge announcement that Apple will be making Swift open source.

Apple launched Swift, a programming language of its own design, at the 2014 World Wide Developers Conference as a proprietary language for mobile app development on both the iOS and OS X platforms. Swift was designed to be a next step and an improvement upon ‘Objective C’ and provide a programming language that was more resistant to error.

Recommended Videos

Swift was built at Apple borrowing ideas “from Objective-C, Rust, Haskell, Ruby, Python, C#, CLU, and far too many others to list.” It was originally available only for development use on Apple’s Cocao and Cocoa Touch API’s. Now however with Apple making Swift open source, developers will have the brand new opportunity to develop applications on Linux based operating systems outside of Apple’s product lineup.

swift 2 — Image used with permission by copyright holder

More importantly than non-Apple development, Swift being made open source will drastically speed up its development. The goal of Swift was to provide an easier, quicker, and more intuitive programming language not only to iOS and OS X developers, but to the world. “We think Swift is the next big programming language,” said Apple’s Craig Federighi, “We think Swift should be everywhere and used by everyone.”

This marks an important step forward in the developer community as it signals a strong message to developers that Apple is invested in growth of the language and the support of their work.

AV Contributor

Andre Revilla is an entrepreneur and writer based in Chicago that has been covering and working in the consumer tech space…

Topics

Computing

AMD just made Ryzen laptop chips even more confusing, but here’s what’s actually new

The refreshed lineup brings more Zen 4 processors to mainstream and budget laptops.

AMD Ryzen 100 and 200 series

AMD has quietly expanded its mobile processor portfolio with 11 new Ryzen laptop processors, adding fresh models under both the Ryzen 200 and Ryzen 100 families. While that sounds straightforward enough, the bigger story isn't the chips themselves -- it's AMD's increasingly confusing naming strategy. The company has introduced seven new Ryzen 200 processors alongside four new Ryzen 100 models, but despite belonging to different series, many of them are actually built on the same Hawk Point silicon featuring Zen 4 CPU cores and RDNA 3 integrated graphics.

The Ryzen 200 series gets seven new CPUs

Computing

OpenAI is killing ChatGPT Atlas browser. I loved it, but it was an uphill race to the top

It was a trailblazer in a few ways, before it was copied down to its skeleton.

ChatGPT Atlas browser on a MacBook.

When OpenAI launched its own web browser, there was plenty of skepticism as to why a frontier AI lab is even bothering with making a browser in the first place. And yet, the company went ahead and launched ChatGPT Atlas with a heavy dosage of AI features built in. Well, the days of browser ambitions are over, and it will be put on cold ice in September this year.

OpenAI says it is sunsetting the short-lived browser in favor of pushing the new ChatGPT work desktop app, which already has a built-in browser as well as a cloud browser for AI agents. And now that ChatGPT is making its way to other browsers, such as Chrome, as an extension, there is little need for maintaining a dedicated browser project of its own.

Computing

Windows 11 Search is getting bigger, but only by 4 pixels

The change could be in preparation for the upcoming Ask Copilot feature

Windows 11 Laptop

If you have used Windows 11 Search after the June update, you may have noticed it feels a little less annoying. Microsoft recently made the Start menu and Search more responsive, and also fixed one of Search’s stranger limits by letting it find local files using just two characters.

Now, the company appears to be making a much smaller change. According to Windows Central, Microsoft accidentally revealed that the search box in the Taskbar and Start menu is getting 4 pixels taller. Four pixels sounds like the kind of change only a UI/UX designer could love, but screenshots from the Insider Preview build suggest it is visible once you know where to look.