Foreign media analysis: Why Apple open-sourced Swift

Apple's plans are indeed promising, but their main concern is to ensure that Swift attracts more developer support.

At the just-concluded WWDC (Worldwide Developers Conference) 2015 conference, Apple announced that it would transform its first Swift programming language, the successor to Objective-C, into an open source project.

The announcement comes alongside Swift 2, which includes even more new features designed to make development faster and easier, and will debut alongside the iOS 9 beta, which is now shipping to registered developers.

"We believe Swift should be everywhere and available to everyone," said Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering, during his keynote at WWDC.

However, Federighi did not disclose specific details about how Swift will be transformed into an open source project. It is not clear whether Swift will be managed directly by Apple or led by an independent foundation.

If history is any guide, Swift's management as an open source project should follow the same path as WebKit, another recent open source project owned by Apple, with Apple no doubt remaining the primary manager, while outsiders will be able to submit their own changes.

The issue of opening up Swift quickly sparked heated debates on both sides. Open source has become the main and even objective way for most developers to participate in technology advancement, so Apple's move to open up its ecosystem is of course very practical - provided that it does not touch the control limit that Apple has always insisted on. (Microsoft has also begun to open its arms to open source.) Swift under the open source mechanism will be easier to port to multiple platforms, and in theory it can follow the same development trajectory as Python or Google Go.

However, this situation is unlikely to happen: open source Swift will bring a large number of non-native libraries to iOS applications that are beyond the control of Apple. Obviously, the strict control of the iOS runtime environment is one of the fundamental means for Apple to ensure the end-user experience on its devices, and this restriction will probably exist for a long time on Swift.

The real significance of open-sourcing Swift may be to attract external developers to the iOS camp by allowing them to use the language they are familiar with, rather than really allowing iOS applications to accept more external technical solutions in an open manner.