Apple has always had big ambitions for Swift, the rapidly growing programming language it created for iPhone and iPad apps.
"My goal for Swift has always been, and still is, total world domination," Chris Lattner, the creator of Swift, said onstage at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in 2017. He said it was a "modest goal" and that the plan had a 10- to 20-year timeline.
In some ways, however, Swift is already making significant progress toward that goal.
Apple released Swift almost six years ago in 2014 and said it was a better, more intuitive way to build apps for iOS. Now Apple's App Store has over 500,000 apps at least partially written in the language, including Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, and Square, and developers say most new iOS apps are created using Swift.
Apple says Swift is used heavily across its ecosystem of apps, including in foundational parts of its operating systems. The MacOS Dock, which is used to launch and switch between applications, is now written in Swift, for example.
Developers are also flocking to the language: Swift programmers make a $120,000 annual salary on average, according to the Stack Overflow comprehensive developer survey, and it's the sixth most loved programming language.
