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IBM says Swift is ready for the enterprise

computerworld.com

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Re: IBM says Swift is ready for the enterprise

#91

Post by hellofunk »

pjmlp wrote: post #83
hellofunk wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the pitch is that despite static typing, it offers a lot of multi-paradigm high-level features while remaining elegant with fairly minimal syntax compared to other native static languages like Rust or C++. It automatically manages memory but without a stop-the-world garbage collector and goes a long way to opening a lot of flexible design options to any developer: it has great support for generic programming,…

> but without a stop-the-world garbage collector a RC is a stop-the-world garbage collector when the reference count reaches 0 in very complex data structures, which trigger a cascade of deletions. Also it has issues with sharing data between threads leading to cache coherency contention and locks.

Fair enough. The point I was (trying) to make is that Swift doesn't have a traditional GC like Java, or Javascript, etc.

Re: IBM says Swift is ready for the enterprise

#92

Post by pjmlp »

mpweiher wrote: post #27
manmal wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a systems language, and imo way more beautiful than c++.

It's not really predictable enough for a systems language.

Can you predict what your C compiler with going to do with your code, taking into account UB and compiler specific implementation behaviors not specified by ANSI C?

Re: IBM says Swift is ready for the enterprise

#93

Post by pjmlp »

geodel wrote: post #55

I think IBM might be moving Java/Websphere technical staff to Swift. Considering new versions Java/JavaEE are getting delayed so IBM would prefer to use Swift increasingly instead of Java.

Not sure, but they are already making J9 modular and using its JIT and GC for their own implementations of Python and Ruby.

So I would say IBM is scattering their eggs across multiple baskets.

Re: IBM says Swift is ready for the enterprise

#94

Post by potatosoup »

valarauca1 wrote: post #44

When I recently interviewed at Apple I was told my position would primarily be coding in Java, but the team would be open to other languages as the project progressed and needs changed. I asked if they would consider Swift. Then was told that Swift wasn't production ready in their eyes. (I didn't get the job) I guess every team is different, but this attitude to dog fooding isn't great.

More context would have been useful here, such as if this was a server-side product (even though you probably understandably can't disclose.)

Swift is great for client-side work, but I wouldn't use it on the server. Each tool good for a certain job. Our current stack is Swift on the client, Elixir on the server, and I haven't been happier.

Re: IBM says Swift is ready for the enterprise

#95

Post by iheartmemcache »

themihai wrote: post #67
barkingcat wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be ready for the enterprise ecosystem basically means that you can sue someone if things go wrong, and you can buy support packages for enormous sums of money. IBM is saying that you can 1) buy bluemix swift from them, and 2) sue them if anything goes wrong - but since they have a great legal team, they probably got ironclad agreements ready to go.

I thought stability of the ecosystem (i.e. stable standard library) was also a "must" for adoption by the enterprise. Never thought that a language in flux with "hosting" support from IBM is enough. But now it seems the enterprise world is eager to try the coolest thing and rewrite/refactor it after the next release as long as someone will host/run it. Now that you enlightened me I can see the stock markets, hospital…

IBM's BlueBix et al was a direct result of the purchase of Rackspace, which was strategic buy to hedge against the growth market of Amazon and it's bazillion EC2-esque offerings. (Likely in response to seeing Amazon's success, almost strategically similar to why Azure and Google's App Service or whatever exist.)

They're still making money hand over fist in maintenance keeping the mainframes up (your state's DMV won't move off MVS/zOS as long as support for their old JCL/REXX stuff is still available, especially those 'cheap' z13s which come in at under 100k) but that's an entirely different tier of customer.

Re: IBM says Swift is ready for the enterprise

#96

Post by spotman »

cageface wrote: post #88

Overall I like Swift and it's certainly a massive quality of life improvement for Mac/iOS devs. But I don't see as much upside for enterprise development. Server side tooling and deployment is still TBD, reference counting adds non-negligible cognitive overhead vs GC in an environment where the downsides of GC matter much less. They will have to build a complete ecosystem of server-side libraries from scratch. And un…

Can you elaborate on the cognitive overhead vs a GC language like golang or java? (With regards to memory)

To me sure there is things you think about but generally memory performance is less of a mental burden.

Also, swift 4 is supposed to support a rust like memory model. Not sure if it's opt in or how it will work but my impression is that it's memory model is about to support some new use cases to make it appropriate for more memory critical tasks.

Re: IBM says Swift is ready for the enterprise

#97

Post by mikeash »

coldtea wrote: post #71
valarauca1 wrote: post #44

When I recently interviewed at Apple I was told my position would primarily be coding in Java, but the team would be open to other languages as the project progressed and needs changed. I asked if they would consider Swift. Then was told that Swift wasn't production ready in their eyes. (I didn't get the job) I guess every team is different, but this attitude to dog fooding isn't great.

> Then was told that Swift3 wasn't production ready in their eyes. Well, not ready for their purposes, which (guessing from Java) would be some App/iTunes store backend, etc. Other teams in Apple already use it for native app development from what I've read.

Working on a big existing codebase is a different scenario too, since adding in Swift either means rewriting the whole thing, or convincing two very different languages to work together. And I imagine that's magnified for Apple's store code, which appears to have the unfortunate combination of receiving a metric buttload of traffic and being held together with baling twine and chewing gum.

I'd speculate that "not production ready" is at least partly rationalization or cover for "we really can't afford to screw around with this codebase, even though this is the company's Big New Thing."

Re: IBM says Swift is ready for the enterprise

#98

Post by themihai »

hellofunk wrote: post #34
nnq wrote: post #20

So... what's the "elevator pitch" for Swift? It has anything interesting over Elixir or Go (well, go's feature is "lack of feature" but you know what I mean) or Scala or Kotlin? I know that iOS and MacOS desperately needed a modern language, and great for them that they have it now, but does the rest of the world need it?

I think the pitch is that despite static typing, it offers a lot of multi-paradigm high-level features while remaining elegant with fairly minimal syntax compared to other native static languages like Rust or C++. It automatically manages memory but without a stop-the-world garbage collector and goes a long way to opening a lot of flexible design options to any developer: it has great support for generic programming,…

> It automatically manages memory

I have to stop you there. You shouldn't compare anything to C/C++ or Rust after that. You are better off comparing Swift with Go(i.e. both have automatic memory management, nice syntax, static typing, dynamic feeling etc) or Java(automatic memory management, well established in the enterprise world). If Apple was to design a language to respond to Go or Java it would be Swift and that's it. So the pitch is that you have a nice language which encourages productivity and you can share the knowledge/code between server and client.

Re: IBM says Swift is ready for the enterprise

#99

Post by Razengan »

valarauca1 wrote: post #44

When I recently interviewed at Apple I was told my position would primarily be coding in Java, but the team would be open to other languages as the project progressed and needs changed. I asked if they would consider Swift. Then was told that Swift wasn't production ready in their eyes. (I didn't get the job) I guess every team is different, but this attitude to dog fooding isn't great.

> this attitude to dog fooding isn't great.

The Dock and a few other components of macOS Sierra are written in 100% Swift, according to this year's WWDC.

Re: IBM says Swift is ready for the enterprise

#100

Post by mdasen »

nnq wrote: post #20

So... what's the "elevator pitch" for Swift? It has anything interesting over Elixir or Go (well, go's feature is "lack of feature" but you know what I mean) or Scala or Kotlin? I know that iOS and MacOS desperately needed a modern language, and great for them that they have it now, but does the rest of the world need it?

It does have some interesting bits.

1. It doesn't have a GC. While the JVM's GC is decent, it can definitely cause latency spikes.

2. It has value types. Go has this, but Scala and Kotlin mean running on the JVM which means leaving memory locality behind. In fact, Swift allows you to select whether you want an object that contains pointers to things or a struct. Go gives you structs and Scala and Kotlin give you pointer-based objects.

If all you care about is syntax, Swift might not be that interesting to you. However, you get options in terms of how the program runs that the other languages you've mentioned don't give you. You can't decide that you want to create an object in Scala or Kotlin that is contiguous in memory. You can't decide you'd rather not have GC pauses in Go.

In many ways, Swift brought together the kind of niceties that have been available before. Generics aren't something new, value types aren't new, objects aren't new, first-class functions aren't new, ARC isn't new, non-nullable variables aren't new, closures aren't new, type inference isn't new. . . But none of those languages have all of those. Go took a hard stance against generics (I'm not going to go into why). The JVM doesn't really do value types. GC has been the standard for most new languages for a while.

Swift definitely offers new things.

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