Introduced in the summer of 2014 with the goal of becoming open source, Apple’s new programming language for iOS and OS X development, called Swift, is now officially available for download via Swift.org.

A wealth of resources is available at the website, including the official documentation to get you up to speed, various Swift downloads, Getting Started guides, the source code and more.

The project is governed “by a core team of engineers” and “a collection of code owners” who are tasked with day-to-day project management. Technical leaders come from the community of contributors.

Apple notes that anyone can earn the right to lead an area of Swift, in accordance with the Community Guidelines.

Here’s the full message from the Swift team:

Swift is now open source! We are excited by this new chapter in the story of Swift. After Apple unveiled the Swift programming language, it quickly became one of the fastest growing languages in history. Swift makes it easy to write software that is incredibly fast and safe by design. Now that Swift is open source, you can help make the best general purpose programming language available everywhere. For students, learning Swift has been a great introduction to modern programming concepts and best practices. And because it is now open, their Swift skills will be able to be applied to an even broader range of platforms, from mobile devices to the desktop to the cloud. Welcome to the Swift community. Together we are working to build a better programming language for everyone.

Built with the fastest LLVM compiler, Swift is native and supports Cocoa and CocoaTouch for both iOS and OS X development. Swift is supported in Apple’s Xcode and produces the same runtime code as Objective-C, which is more complicated to master, and its code can co-exist with Objective-C.

The source code for the Swift language, supporting libraries, debugger and package manager is available under the Apache 2.0 license with a Runtime Library Exception and can be download at no cost through GitHub.

“Everyone is welcome, even just to file a bug report,” says Apple.

Source: Swift.org