<commit_before>---
published: false
title: Swift is now open source!
layout: post
---<commit_msg>Post update: Swift is now open source!<commit_after>---
published: true
title: Swift is now open source!
layout: post
---

Mark this date: December 3, 2015 - the day Swift has become open source! It is absolutely amazing that we are now able to look back into the history of its evolution and see the [first commit](https://github.com/apple/swift/commit/18844bc65229786b96b89a9fc7739c0fc897905e) was made by who else but <NAME>, in July 2010. There has been a tremendous interest for the Swift main repository, with almost 20k stars and 2k forks in just the first few days. A total of 17 repositories were made public by Apple. There have even been a few pull requests accepted and merged, the most notable being the removal of the __++__ and __—__ operators, as well as the good old C-style __for__ loop syntax, all this in the upcoming Swift 3.0 version. If that was not enough, the [Perfect](https://www.perfect.org/) project is already using server-side Swift, and here is a [HTTP server](https://github.com/huytd/swift-http) written in Swift.

So what have we got? First, a new [website](https://swift.org/) as the Swift home; here you can find the new blog, the Swift binaries for OS X and Ubuntu (for now), a Getting Started guide, the Documentation page from where, among other resources, you can download the most recent [Swift Programming Language](https://swift.org/documentation/TheSwiftProgrammingLanguage(Swift2.2).epub) ebook (currently the 2.2 version). Then we got all the source code grouped in no less than 17 repositories. The main ones are:
- [Swift main](https://github.com/apple/swift) which contains the source code for the Swift compiler, standard library, and SourceKit.
- [Swift evolution](https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution) which contains documents related to the continued evolution of Swift, including goals for upcoming releases proposals for changes to and extensions of Swift.
- [Swift corelibs](https://github.com/apple/swift-corelibs-foundation) - there are 3 corelibs repositories but the most important one is Foundation, which contains the source code for Foundation, which provides common functionality for all applications.
- [Swift package manager](https://github.com/apple/swift-package-manager) which contains the source code for Package Manager - a tool for managing the distribution of Swift code. It’s integrated with the Swift build system to automate the process of downloading, compiling, and linking dependencies. 

I will conclude this article with a friendly call to contributing. There are several ways you could get involved:
- the easiest entry way to contributing is to document source code - there are plenty of places that need it
- another easy way is to add unit testing where the code does not have enough/full coverage
- going further to more advanced ways, you can search for `//FIXME` marks inside the code that you could attempt to fix
- also, there are many __NSUnimplemented()__ marks in the `Foundation` code base that you could attempt to implement
- finally, and this is the hardest part, try to resolve bugs from the [Swift issues](https://bugs.swift.org/issues/) list.

Until next time!
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