CommentComment

So, it was shaping up to be a quiet week until yesterday! Unless you've been locked in a windowless, soundproof room for the last 36 hours you'll already be aware that Swift was released as open source, right on schedule. Everything is up on GitHub and already people are tackling the hard problems. 🙄

I'm sure the madness that is the current set of PRs will calm down over the next few days (or weeks) and the proper work will start. But instead of focusing on that, let's talk about the release itself.

I'm extremely impressed with how Apple have approached releasing Swift into the community. When it was announced that there would be an open source release, there was very little detail on what that actually meant. It could have been anything from a simple, occasional source drop to development done in public. What did we get? Well, pretty much everything we could have hoped for. This truly is an open development process now. Not just in terms of the source code, but in terms of everything that goes along with it, including discussion of plans and features for future releases.

To me, the source code itself is the least interesting part of the release (don't forget that Objective-C was open source too!). I really have no need to peruse the depths of the Swift implementation. I’m not a compiler engineer and I doubt that the vast majority of iOS/Mac developers will ever end up deep inside the Swift implementation. What’s exciting to me is all of the peripheral information, and tools that accompanied the release, and even more important than that the fact that the Swift team inside Apple has managed to effect this kind of change.

There’s links to various interesting bits of the release below, but I’ll end here by saying congratulations to all of the team who have been involved in this project. It can’t have been easy and you’ve all done a wonderful job with it. Bravo.

This week's issue is going to be a little lighter on the other links due to the amount of information on the Swift open source release. Back to normal next week though!

Dave Verwer  

News



Tools


Code




Sponsored Jobs


And finally...