Ask HN: What is the future of Swift on the server-side?

We step down from Heroku as well and looking for alternatives. Can you share your Docker somewhere?

Dart has some backend projects and support and is statically typed.

See Very Good Ventures own Dart Frog:

https://github.com/VeryGoodOpenSource/dart_frog

Swift's performance is a mixed bag, and can be closer to JavaScript than C++. It heavily depends on how you manage your objects and how many memory allocations and copies that causes. Swift prioritizes nice syntax over implicit overheads, so it's something to look out for.

If you really really need something high-performance, then Rust is the main contender. Don't be fooled by superficially similar angle brackets syntax. It's not similar to C++, it's is not even a C-family language (closer to ML). Things like having multiple string types may seem like the same mess, but it's not a legacy baggage like in C++, but an explicit meaningful choice exposing ownership and encoding semantics.

If you merely need pretty good performance, go for golang. It's very successful for services.

I don't see room for Swift in server-side languages. It won't be able to shake being Apple's technology first, and having Linux support as a second class. It's not low-level enough to beat Rust on performance. It can't compete with popularity and ease of use of JS/TS and golang.

I've used Swift for iOS development and generally like it. There's no technical reason why it couldn't be great for server-side development but there are two major reasons I wouldn't expect it. First, there's no painful gap to drive adoption. Go and bit by bit Rust are both reasonable statically typed, compiled languages with good ergonomics and performance. Second, there isn't a strong community of corporate and individual developers supporting use outside of iOS. That means few people, but also little tooling. I was excited by the extensibility and some of the stuff the TensorFlow team was doing but there just doesn't seem to be enough reason to pick Swift over one of the more mature alternatives. Even on Apple's own platforms there's only full support for the latest macOS release. I'm guessing the calculation is that iOS is a big enough carrot to keep a community of Swift developers around and Apple doesn't see growing beyond that as a priority. Fair enough.

The complete lack of any explicit support from linux vendors and cloud providers.

For more popular languages you get predefined templates for serverless platforms and compiled binaries directly in the linux distributions default repositories.

In many ways the outside interest in swift died down even quicker then the interest in running ObjectiveC outside of the Apple Ecosystem did, and as the Apple ecosystem don't include an server platform all swift server-side code is running outside of the apple ecosystem.

The problem likely isn't that swift is bad just that it's unremarkable once you take it outside of an iOS context.