Apple to open source Swift programming language

Following in the footsteps of Microsoft open sourcing the core of its .NET platform, Apple announced at its WWDC Keynote earlier today that it will be open sourcing its new Swift programming language. In addition, Swift can be now used to develop applications on iOS, OS X and Linux (but no Windows, yet).

The latest version of Swift include a number of new features – inclduing a new error handling model, protocol extensions, Markdown in comments, synthesised headers in Xcode, and pattern matching in if statements.

At the keynote, Senior Vice President Craig Federighi said that Swift becoming open source will be later this year.