Apple’s new launches at WWDC 2015 showed off many new features and capabilities of both the new iOS 9 and OS X El Capitan. However, the highlight of the evening was when Craig Federighi announced on the stage today that one of the most powerful coding languages, Swift, would become “Open Source”
Swift 2.0 adds a bunch of features that developers have been asking for, to ensure that apps written in Swift are faster and can do more.
“Open source” means that any developer, anywhere in the world, can contribute new features and updates to a software project — totally for free.
Google’s popular Android mobile OS, for example, is open source, which is how smartphone manufacturers can release devices with versions of Android that are slightly different from each other.
Does this mean other manufacturers will be able to make iOS devices – probably not. However with the code becoming open-source, bug fixes and features would develop faster. Swift becoming Open Source will also allow other operating system manufacturers including Google and Microsoft to utilise the features and apply them to their code if they so choose to.
This will allow Android forks like Cyanogen and MiUi to add enhancements to their performance and capability. However, this will also depend on inclination and need to do so from others.
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