IBM launches online environment for programming in Swift; Craig Federighi talks about opening the language code

As we reported yesterday, Apple kept its promise and opened the entire programming language code Swift.

Today, IBM has already launched in beta the Swift Sandbox an online environment for those who want to program in Swift directly in the browser, either on Macs or on PCs with Linux. The code is written in the left column and can be compiled and verified on the right. Of course something very simple / basic, but it already shows a little of what we can see from now on with Swift becoming open source.

Yesterday, Craig Federighi senior vice president of software engineering at Apple also spoke a little about the novelty to Ars Technica and to TNW.

Craig Federighi and open source Swift

The executive is betting heavily on the future of Swift, stating that it should be the next great programming language for the next decades. When opening your code, as we said yesterday, Apple also released ports for Linux (Ubuntu 15.10 and 14.04) but Federighi said that nothing prevents the community from now working on bringing the language to the Windows world as well. Despite all of Apple's investment in Swift, he also ensured that Objective-C does not lose its footprint and that Apple itself will continue to support the language on all of its platforms.

Developers have already started to analyze Swift codes and are noticing great improvements coming for its version 3.0, which will be released in 2016. With the participation of the community, its evolution should accelerate even more.

(via iClarified)