On December 3, 2015, the Swift language, supporting libraries, debugger, and package manager were published under the Apache 2.0 license with a Runtime Library Exception, and Swift.org was created to host the project. The source code is hosted on GitHub where it is easy for anyone to get the code, build it themselves, and even create pull requests to contribute code back to the project. Everyone is welcome, even just to file a bug report. There are excellent Getting Started guides available here on the site as well.
The project is governed by a core team of engineers that drive the strategic direction by working with the community, and a collection of code owners responsible for the day-to-day project management. Technical leaders come from the community of contributors and anyone can earn the right to lead an area of Swift. The Community Overview includes detailed information on how the Swift community is managed.
The Swift language is managed as a collection of projects, each with its own repositories. The current list of projects includes:
- The Swift compiler command line tool
- The standard library bundled as part of the language
- Core libraries that provide higher-level functionality
- The LLDB debugger which includes the Swift REPL
- The Swift package manager for distributing and building Swift source code
- Xcode playground support to enable playgrounds in Xcode.