Apple created the programming language Swift, first released in 2014. Apple introduced Swift at its Worldwide Developers Conference and positioned it as a modern language for developing software across its platforms.
Swift was designed to work with Apple’s existing development ecosystem while offering features intended to improve safety, readability, and performance. It was initially used alongside Objective-C, the language that had long been prominent in Apple software development.
Apple made Swift open source in 2015. The move allowed developers to inspect, modify, and contribute to the language and helped Swift expand beyond Apple operating systems, including through ports supported by the wider community.
Swift is distinct from SwiftUI, Apple’s framework for building user interfaces. Swift is the programming language; SwiftUI is a later toolkit that uses Swift to describe interfaces.