The Future of Swift on the Server

timc.dev

29 points·Lukasa··6 comments

I understand the author’s perspective on the topic, especially from where he’s coming from, but I’m less excited for Swift on the server.

As things currently are you are better off with C++ on the server than with Swift. This is how bad things in reality are.

I could imagine a micro-service here or there where Swift is involved in some kind of bigger enterprise architecture, or as a hobby project, but the ecosystem, the libraries, the documentation, and the community just aren’t there yet.

It’s pretty easy to take Apple’s HTTP implementation, add a router, integrate a template engine and have something running, but I don’t see a reason for this in a professional environment, and I still don’t see Apple as the company who will push a technology that isn’t directly bound to their hardware.

Swift is a language that I have a lot of interest on, but while its bound to iOs only, I can't justify studying it. Swift on the server would be awesome!

Check out Swift for TensorFlow. May give you a new motivation... ;)

https://www.tensorflow.org/swift

it's not bound to IOS, just focused on it. It works in linux and will probably get windows support this year.

also works on Mac OS

The article content is all about how Swift isn’t bound to iOS. You can use it in Ubuntu, Fedora, and inside a Docker container — combined with the “Remote - Docker” extension, as well as some Swift-related extensions hooked up to the included-with-Swift sourcekit-lsp provider, makes editing and running Swift on Linux fairly easy.

And Swift 6 will likely see Swift on Windows, sometime next year. That work will be built upon the efforts for Swift on Linux, so you can get ready for that today.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com