They used to offer free student developer memberships, but I think they stopped that a while back. Now you have to be part of one of the paid programs (or be part of a university that's signed up with Apple).
It is pretty disappointing that Apple is walling in Swift like this. I was excited about it to begin with, because it looks like a great language, but apparently as Microsoft moves toward openness, Apple is doing the opposite. Now I'm not really sure what to do with it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
I don't mean that they won't release it, but that they haven't indicated any intention to release it except as a binary thrown over the wall into their developer program. They just held a very big developer conference and made no mention of it being free or open-source. Their "LLVM work" up till this point has all been C and Objective-C stuff that's part of the LLVM Project and they have made a big point of that, so I don't really see how it reflects on this, which is not part of the LLVM Project and is not based on existing cross-platform languages where they're competing with other open-source tools.
A proprietary Swift even sort of makes logical sense. I could easily see Apple thinking that since Swift is intimately tied to its proprietary system frameworks, Swift should be proprietary too.
The C stuff wasn't part of LLVM until Apple made clang, a separate C frontend which uses LLVM. It's part of the LLVM project only because they contributed it; there's no particular inherent reason it had to be.
It is pretty disappointing that Apple is walling in Swift like this. I was excited about it to begin with, because it looks like a great language, but apparently as Microsoft moves toward openness, Apple is doing the opposite. Now I'm not really sure what to do with it.