Apple's Swift Programming Language Comes To Linux

Short Bytes: Apple has finally brought its Swift programming language to Linux. At this moment, this open source programming language supports Ubuntu 14.04 and 15.10. This port is relatively new and the Swift Core Libraries will be included later in Swift 3 release.

Compared to other technology companies, Apple is known to lock down its code. However, last year the company decided to open source Swift, its rapdially growing iOS and OS X app development programming language.

Going one step ahead, Apple has decided to bring Swift to Linux with the release of Swift 2.2. If we talk about specific Linux distributions, at the moment, Swift supports Ubunut Linux 14.04 and 15.10.

In its announcement post, Apple writes that the Linux port is relatively new and this release excludes the Swift Core Libraries which will be ported later in Swift 3. However, the current support includes the REPL and LLDB. LLDB is LLVM project’s debugger and also finds use in Apple’s Xcode. On the other hand, REPL is a the language shell.

Swift 2.2 is a minor release that includes contributions from 212 non-Apple developers which is a great news for the open source future of the programming language.

Some main features of Swift 2.2:

Linux support
Allowing keywords as argument labels
Naming functions with Argument labels
Numerous bug fixes
Enhancements to diagnostics
Faster-running code
Tuple comparison operators
Swift Language Version Build Configuration
Constraining AnySequence.init
Replace typealias keyword with associatedtype for associated type declarations
Referencing the Objective-C selector of a method

It looks like Apple is following its arch rival Microsoft in the open source playground. Maybe these tech giants have realised the true meaning of open source and FOSS. “I think, fundamentally, open source does tend to be more stable software. It’s the right way to do things,” as Linus Torvalds says.

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