![](https://csdnimg.cn/release/download_crawler_static/9655766/bg13.jpg)
What Were They Thinking?
[ 8 ]
I want to briefly touch on a couple of themes here as it will provide a base for the material
you will find in the remaining chapters:
Apple believes that for Swift to grow in adoption it needs a strong community.
The path to rapid Swift adoption is to include the voices of the community in its
development.
Swift is a general-purpose language that could and should run on any platform.
Imagine running Swift on Linux or on the Internet of Things (IoT) you create or
need to control. Apple believes that the Swift language is so capable that they
removed the barriers that tied Swift to running on a Mac, opening endless
possibilities for platform portability. Apple wants the community to find ways to
get Swift to run on other platforms. Today, the Swift team is supporting a port to
Linux. Tomorrow, the Swift team could have official support for a wide range of
platforms.
In order to make the first two themes possible, the Swift team needs to get things
right from the beginning with Swift 3. Unfortunately, this means that the new
changes in Swift 3 do not work well with previous releases of Swift. The Swift 3
release will fix and remove things that were awkward in Swift 2 (and its
predecessors). Swift 3 also re-imagines how it interacts with Cocoa and Objective-
C to make the APIs that bridge them feel more Swifty.
Swift is a really big deal to Apple and expectations from the language are high. Apple has
laid out its roadmap for how it expects to reach its goals. In fact, you can stay current with
all things Swift by subscribing to one of the mailing lists found here h t t p s : / / s w i f t . o r g / c o
m m u n i t y / # m a i l i n g - l i s t s. The main method for communicating with the Swift community
is via mailing lists. You can find mailing lists that cater to general information as well as
lists for day-to-day updates on the language. The Swift mailing lists can be a valuable tool
that you should not overlook.
In the next section, we will talk about what the open source community means for you as a
Swift developer.
Open source Swift
On December 3 2015, Apple open-sourced Swift (including the language, supporting
libraries, debugger, and package manager) under the Apache 2.0 license and launched the h
t t p s : / / S w i f t . o r g / website on the same day. h t t p s : / / S w i f t . o r g / is the official site to
find resources on the various projects that make up Swift. It's your main source to read
announcements on all of the development work on the language, from proposals of new
features, to links to development branches of Swift code that you can download and test.