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Comment by briandear | Hacker News Reader

Generally only useful within the Apple ecosystem is definitely inaccurate.

The problem is that people only think it’s generally useful in the Apple ecosystem.

I don't use Swift not because I think it's not useful outside Apple, but because I believe its developer experience is poor. Some stories that formed my opinions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9947193

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42803489

Granted, my perception may be wrong, but trying it to know for sure costs time. Swift has not earned my time investment.

The second example is moot since, outside the Apple ecosystem, you don't even need to know Xcode exists.

They have stalled, and the concurency is making things harder to implement right.

Basically, Vapor has to be re-written as it is, in order to work will with swift 6+. Which kinda kills already any little moment it had.

Was looking to use it with a new project, as it is a nice framework, but going with GoLang on the server side due to all this in flux changes.

what advantages does swift offer over go/rust/js/java for server side programming? I always presumed the advantages of swift were native code compilation + top tier integration w/the apple ecosystem.

In my little usage of it (and go and rust), Swift feels like a nice middleground between go and rust. Or, a better (safer) go.

I think Swift is vastly underestimated due to it's relation to Apple.

I don't think people care about its relation to Apple, they care about the language ecosystem, roadmap and evolution that were shaped by Apple's needs for iOS and macOS before there was a real attempt at making Swift more general purpose and multi-platform. And now that it's somewhat there, there are better options in almost every dimension.

I have a few personal and professional Swift on server projects, in the wild and in the works. Code reuse is a big win – we can ~easily expose functionality of our client apps to other systems. Familiarity is another – there's an ocean of iOS (and, to a lesser extent, macOS) developers out there who are familiar with Swift. With a little bit of coaching, they can pretty quickly get up to speed with how services work.

It reminds me a lot of what it was like to ship Node.js software 15 years ago – the ecosystem is still young, but there are enough resources out there to solve 95% of the problems you'll face.

It's a high level language that doesn't get in your way.

In my experience, writing Swift for the backend feels a lot like writing TypeScript, but nicer — though that’s just a personal preference. You get the performance of a compiled language like Rust (though that’s rarely a bottleneck for backend applications), but Swift is significantly easier than Rust and has much faster compile times.

The advantage is obvious if you already use Swift.

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