[jmgrosen]

I wouldn't be surprised if Apple ends up open sourcing Swift after it cleans it up, perhaps even making it an LLVM project. I see it similarly to how they handled their own AArch64 backend -- proprietary at first, but mostly for secrecy before it was announced and then merging it with the preexisting backend after it was announced.

[chc]

How much cleaning up do you expect at this point? It's already both announced and released to developers. Obviously it's not 100% finished, but if they intended to open-source it, I wouldn't expect that announcement to come after publicly releasing it.

[X-Istence]

They haven't publicly released it yet. Xcode 6 which includes Swift is currently part of the beta available as part of the Apple Developer Program.

That means it is still under NDA as well. Most likely after Xcode 6 is released publicly (i.e. available on the Mac App Store) they will do a code dump back to the LLVM project.

[cmelbye]

> That means it is still under NDA as well.

Partially. They made the language manual freely available on the iBookstore.

[X-Istence]

I'll grant you that. The compiler/llvm/clang parts of it though are still under NDA.

[smackfu]

They did announce they would not guarantee source compatibility until after the release date. So the language will likely change a bit still.

[chc]

Huh, I must have missed that. That's definitely contrary to the message most of their stuff is putting out, which is "Go ahead and and use it to write applications." Thanks for pointing that out.

[mitchty]

There is a context you're missing. Use it sure, but be ready for them to change things prior to GA.

This happens pretty often in their betas. First few iterations of even new frameworks can end up doing vastly different things than later versions.

[e28eta]

And promised converters for any source changes necessary. I expect it'll be similar to the Convert to ARC and Objective-C Literals Menu items in Xcode.

[grey-area]

I agree open sourcing this would be the logical move and maybe even open up its usage outside the iOS/OS X ecosystem long term, which would be in the best interests of Apple, but it's not ready for production use yet - from their announcement page:

And when iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite are released this fall, you can submit apps that use Swift to the App Store and Mac App Store.

This is intended as a beta, and they won't even allow you to use it in production yet, even if you wanted to, so you can expect some small changes to the language spec as they refine it. Typically the xcode betas can't be used to submit, and Apple have released other projects closed source before open sourcing them (for example webkit).

It's interesting that they're moving development on both platforms to this new language. I wonder when we'll see a unified API?