Swift is a compiled, statically typed programming language that was first released in 2014 and became open source in 2015. It supports object-oriented, procedural, and functional programming paradigms. Swift has built-in support for arrays, dictionaries, tuples, and sets, as well as common control flow constructs like conditionals and loops. Users can define classes, structures, and enumerations and protocols to organize their code. Functions, closures, and objects are supported.