There has been a great disturbance in the Swift community: Brian Gesiak has done the work necessary to get Swift up-and-running on Android and opened a pull request on GitHub.

This adds an Android target for the stdlib. It is also the first example of cross-compiling outside of Darwin: a Linux host machine builds for an Android target.

If this draws the ire of higher-ups at Apple, this could get … interesting. Apple have clearly acknowledged Android more than they have historically with 2 native Android apps. Further, they stand to benefit from Swift’s wider adoption. But there is a sense in which Apple loses by improving the development environment of Android with the clearly delightful Swift. On my view, Java has yet to catch up to Objective-C considering the lack of blocks, never mind Swift and its tuples.