Swift Distributed Actors
swift.org
Swift Distributed Actors
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Re: Swift Distributed Actors
#2Woah, very cool - I guess Distributed Objects is getting a facelift and making a comeback. [1]
What's old is new again, as they say.
[1] https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Co...
Re: Swift Distributed Actors
#3This seems like a super interesting feature to have as part of a language. I hope Swift can eventually become more of a general purpose language, as its actually pretty nice and they're introducing features like this that clearly targets server-side programming. However it seems right now its tied to much to just iOS development and Xcode, which doesn't make for a great experience using it for other things.
Re: Swift Distributed Actors
#4How is the Swift experience outside of the Apple ecosystem? And how does it compare to other languages like C# and Java?
Re: Swift Distributed Actors
#5This seems like a super interesting feature to have as part of a language. I hope Swift can eventually become more of a general purpose language, as its actually pretty nice and they're introducing features like this that clearly targets server-side programming. However it seems right now its tied to much to just iOS development and Xcode, which doesn't make for a great experience using it for other things.
> Konrad Malawski is a member of a team developing foundational server-side Swift libraries at Apple, with focus on distributed systems and concurrency
Re: Swift Distributed Actors
#6This seems like a super interesting feature to have as part of a language. I hope Swift can eventually become more of a general purpose language, as its actually pretty nice and they're introducing features like this that clearly targets server-side programming. However it seems right now its tied to much to just iOS development and Xcode, which doesn't make for a great experience using it for other things.
> Konrad Malawski is a member of a team developing foundational server-side Swift libraries at Apple, with focus on distributed systems and concurrency
If I am not wrong he also worked on Akka, the distributed actors library for Scala.
Re: Swift Distributed Actors
#7Where is the side to side comparison of features and to-do between this and existing distributed actor implementations, such as erlang + otp or java and whatever thing it uses?
This approach of ignoring the rest of the world and explaining Swift concepts as if they exist in a vacuum is frustrating and counter-productive.
Even if this were a totally new feature, I'd expect links to research papers.
It is one thing to present end users with 'shiny new iphone' every year. It is another to treat developers like idiots and have every swift related announcement be this sales pitch of 'great new feature' when in reality they are all features other languages have had for decades (and are thus mature, while Swift is always half-baked and full of gotchas) and this is yet another re-implementation of what already exists with undocumented arbitrary differences that people then have to spend time to figure out (aka free beta test) when I'm sure the people who implement this stuff (hopefully) know full well what trade-offs they are making.
Re: Swift Distributed Actors
#8How is the Swift experience outside of the Apple ecosystem? And how does it compare to other languages like C# and Java?
Pretty bad. In my last company we tried to get server-side swift integrated into a backend microservice.
While there is big-company momentum behind swift on servers, it’s always a second-class citizen compared to its own native platforms (iOS & macOS).
After IBM stopped backing it, pretty much killed credibility in server-side swift.
We switched over to Rust fairly early on, and we were glad we did.
I think the realization was that client-side app engineering is just different from distributed back-end systems.
On iOS, we have a very rich set of standard toolkits we can consume. So development is fast and streamlined. Battle-hardened.
But with swift on servers, you’re reinventing the wheel for even the most basic things. So it may very well be a completely different language on the backend at that point.
Re: Swift Distributed Actors
#9This sort of language cruft makes me realize that Lisp had it right all along.
Re: Swift Distributed Actors
#10How is the Swift experience outside of the Apple ecosystem? And how does it compare to other languages like C# and Java?
I was perusing the implementation of String the other day and it’s intrinsically linked to the ObjC runtime to allow toll free bridging. The multi platform story for Swift is non existent.