Apple’s Swift Programming Language Comes To Windows As An Unofficial Port
Short Bytes: Programming enthusiasts are expecting a Windows port for Swift when the version 3.0 of language arrives later this year. However, you can use an unofficial Windows port for Swift and play with Apple’s new and popular programming language. This port’s code is available on GitHub and it claims to provide basic Swift functionality on Windows 10 64-bit.
Apple’s high-performance programming language Swift is being loved by developers due to its clean and efficient syntax. This relatively new language has become a replacement for Objective-C language and being used to write apps for iOS.
Last year, in December, Apple made its Swift programming language open source, followed by bringing the same to Linux. Adding to its popularity, tech giant IBM went ahead and created a dedicated cloud development environment for Swift.
However, no open source port of Swift code has been announced for Windows. While one could expect an upcoming Windows port in future, in the meantime, an unofficial open source effort has been made to port Apple’s Swift language to Windows.
The Windows port of Swift doesn’t appear to be sponsored by Apple and Microsoft. It code is available on GitHub and prebuilt binaries make use of Microsoft Visual C++ and Cygwin.
You can also spot a different project on Redmond’s CodePlex hub that provides a simple Windows compiler for Swift.
Well, you shouldn’t get too happy as you won’t be able to use these libraries for windowing and you need to have knowledge of Win32 API to do that.
We can hope that Apple brings Swift programming language to Windows with version 3.0 as iPhone-maker has long term plans for Swift including platform portability.
In the meantime, this unofficial port of Swift for Windows should help the programming enthusiasts quench their thirst.
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