Eight months after Apple debuted Swift, a new third-party implementation is extending the programming language beyond iOS onto Android and .NET.
As new programming languages experience rapid spikes in popularity and adoption, the development communities around them often emerge to fill gaps in the tool chain the creators hadn’t yet addressed. It’s a natural cycle in language ecosystems that’s birthed companies like Xamarin, whose Mono implementation filled the gap in cross-platform .NET and C# tooling, and the same process resulting in Silver: a compiler and development environment for writing code in Apple’s Swift language on Android, Java, Mono, .NET and the OS X Cocoa APIs.
