Swift

Swift is a high-level, general-purpose, compiled programming language created by Chris Lattner in 2010 for Apple Inc. that was first released in June 2014.

Apple intended Swift to support many core concepts of Objective-C, but in a safer way, making it easier to catch bugs.

Swift was introduced at Apple's 2014 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). It was initally a proprietary language, but version 2.2 was made open-source under the Apache License 2.0 on December 3, 2015.

History

Development of Swift started in July 2010 by Chris Lattner, motivated by a need for a replacement for Apple's earlier programming language Objective-C, which lacked modern language features.

On June 2, 2014, the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) application became the first publicly released app written with Swift. A beta verison of the programming language was released to registered Apple developers at the conference.

Swift reached version 1.0 on September 9, 2014, with Xcode 6.0 for iOS. Swift 1.1 was released on October 22, 2014, alongside the launch of Xcode 6.1. Swift 1.2 was released on April 8, 2015, along with Xcode 6.3. Swift 2.0 was announced at WWDC 2015, and was made available for publishing apps in the Apple App Store on September 21, 2015. Swift 3.0 was released on September 13, 2016, bringing a significant evolution to the syntax.

On December 3, 2015, the Swift language, supporting libraries, debugger, and package manager were open-sourced under the Apache 2.0 license.

Swift won first place for Most Loved Programming Language in the 2015 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, and second place in 2016.

In January 2017, Chris Lattner announced his departure from Apple for a new position with Tesla Motors, so the Swift project lead role went to Ted Kremenek.

Swift 4.0, released on September 19, 2017, introduced many changes to some built-in classes and structures. Swift 4.1 was released on March 29, 2018. In the first quarter of 2018, Swift surpassed Objective-C in popularity.

Swift 5, released in March 2019, introduced a stable binary interface on Apple platforms, allowing the Swift runtime to be added into Apple operating systems.

Swift 5.1 was released in September 2019. Swift 5.1 introduces module stability, extending the stable features of the language to compile-time. The introduction of module stability makes it possible to create and share binary frameworks that will work with future releases of Swift.

Swift 5.5, announced by Apple at the 2021 WWDC, expands language support for concurrency and asynchoronous code. Swift 5.9, was released in September 2023 and includes a macro system, generic parameter packs, and ownership features. Swift 5.10, released in March 2024, improves the language's concurrency model, allowing for full data isolation to prevent data races.

Swift 6 was released on September 2024, and Swift 6.1, including new language enhancements to improve the language and experience, was released in March 2025.

Example Code

The following line of code prints, "Hello, world!", to the terminal screen.

print("Hello, world!")

References

En Wikipedia Org. (2026). Swift (Programming Language). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swift_(programming_language). Retrieved August 7, 2026.