Nate Swanner, writing for The Next Web:

About the time Swift was going open source, representatives for three major brands — Google, Facebook and Uber — were at a meeting in London discussing the new language. Sources tell The Next Web that Google is considering making Swift a “first class” language for Android, while Facebook and Uber are also looking to make Swift more central to their operations.

Google’s Android operating system currently supports Java as its first-class language, and sources say Swift is not meant to replace Java, at least initially. While the ongoing litigation with Oracle is likely cause for concern, sources say Google considers Swift to have a broader “upside” than Java.

This is a fantastic development (sorry!). Imagine being able to write some core code in Swift and have it serve as part of both an iOS and Android project. Obviously, the interface frameworks will never be the same, but there’s plenty of code that doesn’t depend on a particular operating system. I love this idea.

[H/T Satyender Mahajan]