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Non-existent unfortunately. Swift hasn't taken off outside of the Apple ecosystem, which is of course heavily client focussed. If you like the look of Swift, but you're writing backend code then I would definitely recommend Rust. It's actually super nice to work with. Not at all like C++. Other alternatives would be Kotlin, C#, Go, or even Java.
Google's Go language is well suited for back-end code. However, it's a very opinionated and quirky language. If its style suits you it's a great choice. If, after looking at it for a bit, it doesn't sit well then nope.
What did you find to be quirky?
- checking for "if err != nil {" boilerplate
- having $GOPATH instead of using the current directory when setting up a project. This one is not a problem anymore I believe.
We (Transeo [1]) use Swift and Vapor to power our application which serves millions of users and regularly hits 20k requests per second. We're running on substantially less hardware than we budgeted for, which is great, and the performance is also notable - our p99 response time at peak rps is ~250ms.
That being said, performance isn't the only thing that you should look for when choosing your backend language/framework, as you've noted. We've been using Swift/Vapor for more than 5 years now so we've seen the community grow alongside it, and I am really excited about where it's going. While the ecosystem at one time was a bit of challenge (in terms of finding a package to do something, etc), over the last ~2 years we have rarely run into problems finding code snippets or packages to accomplish our tasks. We do a lot of bulk CSV processing (hundreds of gb's at a time), SFTP transfers, PDF generation/merging, calculated database locking, all of which has been relatively seamless ecosystem-wise. Check out the SSWG projects [2] for some more cool stuff happening in the ecosystem.
Hiring has been fine as well - we have a number of developers on the team that did not have Swift or Vapor experience coming in and were able to map other frameworks on top of it and pick it up quickly.
All of that being said, I will admit that I am biased on this topic :) Frameworks and programming languages are merely tools in your tool-belt, and different tools are right for different workloads.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What did you find to be quirky?
Not OP, but at the very beginning I found quirky: - checking for "if err != nil {" boilerplate - having $GOPATH instead of using the current directory when setting up a project. This one is not a problem anymore I believe.
Swift on Server has become quite mature over the past years. The ecosystem features a libraries for a lot of tools you want to integrate. Furthermore, it is being used in production by some major companies besides Apple, e.g. Amazon has a bunch of production services running on it. One of the greatest things about Swift on Server is not only the language but also the community. They are very open to new joiners and t…
Source on Amazon running Swift services? Excuse my doubt, but I've never heard of that and it seems very unlikely to me.
Crystal (like Ruby but fast and statically typed)
D (a "better" C/C++ with GC)
Pascal (a C/C++ competitor which has fallen out of favor, but is still being developed as FreePascal)
> What are the other alternatives, Nim? You should check out Kotlin. Design-wise, it's very similar to Swift, but it has a bigger userbase on the backend and an (imo) more promising future.
Kotlin is probably a few years further into its journey. There's some server-side Kotlin being written, but I wouldn't say a lot.
I think you're misinterpreting the direction of Rust. Rust 1.65 didn't add a new feature, it removed a limitation on an existing feature. That's the direction I want my languages to be going in.
from Swift using https://www.perfect.org/
to Rust using https://github.com/http-rs/tide