Server APIs Project

#1

Post by OberstKrueger » Tue, Oct 25, 2016, 5:15 PM UTC

Re: Server APIs Project

#2

Post by rpeden » Tue, Oct 25, 2016, 6:03 PM UTC

This looks like a very organized project with well defined goals, both of which are points that will help it succeed.

It seems there's a bit of a trend back toward compiled languages (Go, Rust, Swift) that don't rely on the JVM or .NET CLR to run. I think that these are all great languages, though I almost wish for something like a better, more modern, cross-platform COM to easily share libraries among the languages.

I've only had to work with COM very, very occasionally though. If I'd had to work with it for any extended period of time, I probably wouldn't be wishing for it, or anything like it. Perhaps sharing functionality between languages is better accomplished by separate services communicating via something like 0MQ.

Re: Server APIs Project

#3

Post by squiguy7 » Tue, Oct 25, 2016, 6:04 PM UTC

I have been following Rust's push into server-side development and can tell it is still green. There is a great foundation with the hyper library but quite a bit of fragmentation with frameworks and the async side of things.

It will be interesting to see where swift goes with all this. I know Rust has a lot of traction now with cross-platform support and language features, but I think swift is poised to offer a much different experience for server-side development.

Re: Server APIs Project

#4

Post by mozumder » Tue, Oct 25, 2016, 6:07 PM UTC

Some future server APIs should include database connectors, machine learning libraries, & image/video processing.

Standardize on these before everything gets out-of-hand.

Re: Server APIs Project

#5

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Oct 25, 2016, 6:08 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Server APIs Project

#6

Post by adamnemecek » Tue, Oct 25, 2016, 6:19 PM UTC

rpeden wrote: post #2

This looks like a very organized project with well defined goals, both of which are points that will help it succeed. It seems there's a bit of a trend back toward compiled languages (Go, Rust, Swift) that don't rely on the JVM or .NET CLR to run. I think that these are all great languages, though I almost wish for something like a better, more modern, cross-platform COM to easily share libraries among the languages.…

> Perhaps sharing functionality between languages is better accomplished by separate services communicating via something like 0MQ.

Yeah, I think that people don't want to get back from these. The setup is more complex (as in you have to write a bunch of code) but the coupling is a lot looser.

Re: Server APIs Project

#7

Post by michaelsbradley » Tue, Oct 25, 2016, 6:23 PM UTC

rpeden wrote: post #2

This looks like a very organized project with well defined goals, both of which are points that will help it succeed. It seems there's a bit of a trend back toward compiled languages (Go, Rust, Swift) that don't rely on the JVM or .NET CLR to run. I think that these are all great languages, though I almost wish for something like a better, more modern, cross-platform COM to easily share libraries among the languages.…

OPC UA (IEC 62541) provides a robust platform-neutral information model, and multiple options for transport. Similarly, it specifies events, subscriptions, discovery and several higher-level abstractions (e.g. alarms and programs). In some sense, it's a cross-platform successor to COM/DCOM.

Some open source implementations are incomplete, but work continues.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPC_Unified_Architecture

https://github.com/open62541/open62541

https://github.com/OPCFoundation

You may also find Woopsa interesting, depending on your use cases.

http://www.woopsa.org/

Re: Server APIs Project

#8

Post by nxc18 » Tue, Oct 25, 2016, 6:23 PM UTC

rpeden wrote: post #2

This looks like a very organized project with well defined goals, both of which are points that will help it succeed. It seems there's a bit of a trend back toward compiled languages (Go, Rust, Swift) that don't rely on the JVM or .NET CLR to run. I think that these are all great languages, though I almost wish for something like a better, more modern, cross-platform COM to easily share libraries among the languages.…

.NET is a modern, cross-platform com with excellent Multilanguage support. And if you really hate the idea of a VM, you can do dotnet native right now on Windows - there are strong indications that straight-to-c++ compilation will be here for .NET core (cross platform) very soon.

Re: Server APIs Project

#9

Post by ruddct » Tue, Oct 25, 2016, 6:26 PM UTC

Great. Great great great. A thousand times great. We've been slowly converting our iOS projects over to Swift over the past year and the results have been tremendous (a ~40% drop in LOC from ObjC, among many other benefits). Really the only language-level feature that feels missing for server development is first-class support for asynchronous/concurrent operations, but that's coming.

Swift is truly a 'best of most worlds' language. Typed, but without the boilerplate seen in a lot of typed languages. Syntax that makes sense and is consistent. Immutability strongly encouraged, but not required. OO if you want it. First class functions. Etc, etc, etc. It's truly a dream to work in, can't wait for server-side to get a little more mature.

Re: Server APIs Project

#10

Post by rpeden » Tue, Oct 25, 2016, 6:30 PM UTC

nxc18 wrote: post #8

rpeden wrote: post #2

This looks like a very organized project with well defined goals, both of which are points that will help it succeed. It seems there's a bit of a trend back toward compiled languages (Go, Rust, Swift) that don't rely on the JVM or .NET CLR to run. I think that these are all great languages, though I almost wish for something like a better, more modern, cross-platform COM to easily share libraries among the languages.…

.NET is a modern, cross-platform com with excellent Multilanguage support. And if you really hate the idea of a VM, you can do dotnet native right now on Windows - there are strong indications that straight-to-c++ compilation will be here for .NET core (cross platform) very soon.

I don't hate the idea of a VM. :) Most of the work I do runs on the CLR or JVM. I just think that in some ways it would be helpful to be easily be able to write a library in Go, for example, and use it in Rust or Swift. Or FreePascal, or anything else.

I suppose it wouldn't be insanely difficult to use the C interop facilities in each language plus a bit of C as glue code to share things between them. But it would be interesting to be able to say "here's my library, and here's the interface it exports. Import it and have fun!". Though I'm sure there are lots of fun details and edge cases I'm completely failing to consider.

I'm looking forward to the .NET Core to C++ compilation! There are plenty of interesting things happening in the .NET world right now.