14 DAY TRIAL // Five days after it was officially released as an open source project on GitHub, the Swift programming language is now the most popular language hosted on the service.
No, it did not beat Java and JavaScript when it comes to the sheer numbers of lines of code and user popularity, but only the source code repositories of other programming languages, per se.
According to statistics provided by GitHub, in terms of "stars," the equivalent of a Facebook like or Twitter fave (heart), Swift already has over 21,000 stars, beating Mozilla's Rust programming language, the former leader of this ranking, which only has 14,400 stars.
Third is Google's Go language with 12,800 stars, and then followed by CoffeeScript, a JavaScript subset, with 12,200 stars, Ruby with 8,600 stars, and then the recently updated PHP language with 8,100 stars.
Other major programming languages that Swift has beaten in only five days include Scala, Clojure, and Erlang/OTP.
Take into account that this ranking only classifies programming languages that are hosted on GitHub and are open source. If Java's source were published tomorrow, we don't believe Swift would stand a chance of keeping its number one spot more than a week, or even faster.
With Apple saying many times it sees Swift as a natural evolution of Objective-C, expect Swift to replace the latter in GitHub's yearly Top Programming Languages ranking, where Objective-C was spotted the last time in 2014, ranked #9.