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Pushing Swift to the Server

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Re: Pushing Swift to the Server

#41

Post by simonh »

pier25 wrote: post #32

Swift is fast and the language is nice and all, but this feels more like propaganda. Let's not forget IBM and Apple have become friends recently.[1] I really don't see Swift becoming a popular full stack solution outside of environments invested in iOS and macOS. Swift can indeed run on a multitude of systems but that doesn't mean it's a good option. For example it's not even close to being ready for Android. It can…

> You have to do all sorts of acrobatics with testing devices...

A problem completely unheard of in Android land.

Ok, so maybe you can find a few situations in which Android might be a better solution that iOS. Congratulations. Android for the win. But there are many, many craptons of successful iOS apps out there that might like to be able to use services running on e.g. Linux. The existence of useful roles for Android devices won't make those go away.

Re: Pushing Swift to the Server

#42

Post by simonh »

echelon wrote: post #5

Is Swift on the server a good idea? I don't own (or plan to own) a Mac. Does Apple support cross-platform tooling? I honestly don't know, but given their history, my default assumption is to be skeptical. Why would you choose this over Go or Rust? (Rust is totally sweet for server dev, and I've spun up a few Rust servers for things.)

For you, if you don't own a Mac as you say and are not interested in iOS development, at this stage almost certainly not. You should probably stick with more mature existing tools.

One day Swift on the server, or other platforms, might be interesting completely aside from the Apple ecosystems, but for now I think it's main attraction on the server side is for people already using Swift for MacOS or iOS development.

Re: Pushing Swift to the Server

#43

Post by Cyph0n »

regularfry wrote: post #2

Wow. That "same language connected by an interface schema would have prevented Mars mission loss" thing is a really thin stretch.

What's worse is that the whole "story" wasn't even tied in to the rest of the talk. So basically, the guy spent 10 minutes talking about an interesting anecdote that had almost nothing to do with the rest of the talk.

Re: Pushing Swift to the Server

#44

Post by simonh »

Perignon wrote: post #25

Why? Why choose Swift over a language with an established framework ala python, ruby, ASP.NET, Node.js ?

Mainly because you are already writing your MacOS or iOS app in Swift anyway and might even be able to re-use some code. If you aren't, no real reason for now to be honest.

Re: Pushing Swift to the Server

#45

Post by coldtea »

pier25 wrote: post #32

Swift is fast and the language is nice and all, but this feels more like propaganda. Let's not forget IBM and Apple have become friends recently.[1] I really don't see Swift becoming a popular full stack solution outside of environments invested in iOS and macOS. Swift can indeed run on a multitude of systems but that doesn't mean it's a good option. For example it's not even close to being ready for Android. It can…

>Swift is fast and the language is nice and all, but this feels more like propaganda. Let's not forget IBM and Apple have become friends recently.

Let's not forget it. How does that make presenting their product propaganda any more so than any other product presentation? Heck, they even use it themselves for their backend.

>I really don't see Swift becoming a popular full stack solution outside of environments invested in iOS and macOS.

Doesn't Apple becoming friends with IBM ensure that it will be used at least by many IBM customers? Which is quite a large potential base (and not all are happy for how Oracle moves with Java).

I also don't see why a top notch, statically compiled, very fast language, with automatic memory management, and support from a huge vendor AND a huge community AND open source, wont catch up.

>Swift can indeed run on a multitude of systems but that doesn't mean it's a good option. For example it's not even close to being ready for Android. It can run, but that's it.

That's because the work for porting properly there hasn't been done yet. But it's more or less the same with Google's own Go, which is much older than Swift, Rust, D, etc.

Re: Pushing Swift to the Server

#46

Post by falcolas »

aub3bhat wrote: post #30
regularfry wrote: post #2

Wow. That "same language connected by an interface schema would have prevented Mars mission loss" thing is a really thin stretch.

This submission reminds me of "Satirical hacker news post" """ The Muskonauts figured out why their shit exploded. Hackernews, literally all of whom are actual rocket scientists, wonders if unit tests could have helped. """ Also conveniently forgetting that Computer Scientists are yet to solve types physical dimensions mapping in practical programming language. https://hackage.haskell.org/package/dimensional

The Muskonauts figured out why their shit exploded. The Applluminati wants to replace the Muskonauts' shit with their own shit.

Re: Pushing Swift to the Server

#47

Post by pier25 »

simonh wrote: post #41
pier25 wrote: post #32

Swift is fast and the language is nice and all, but this feels more like propaganda. Let's not forget IBM and Apple have become friends recently.[1] I really don't see Swift becoming a popular full stack solution outside of environments invested in iOS and macOS. Swift can indeed run on a multitude of systems but that doesn't mean it's a good option. For example it's not even close to being ready for Android. It can…

> You have to do all sorts of acrobatics with testing devices... A problem completely unheard of in Android land. Ok, so maybe you can find a few situations in which Android might be a better solution that iOS. Congratulations. Android for the win. But there are many, many craptons of successful iOS apps out there that might like to be able to use services running on e.g. Linux. The existence of useful roles for Andr…

As long as you are ok with going through the App Store and only using iOS then yeah, good for you.

This is what I meant earlier with:

> I really don't see Swift becoming a popular full stack solution outside of environments invested in iOS and macOS.

But in many enterprise, industrial, education, and scientific applications, iOS is a complete fail. Not because of iOS in itself, but because of the many restrictions Apple imposes on the development workflow and the limited hardware.

Or if you need cough mobile crossplatform cough...

Re: Pushing Swift to the Server

#48

Post by vvanders »

Shank wrote: post #7
echelon wrote: post #5

Is Swift on the server a good idea? I don't own (or plan to own) a Mac. Does Apple support cross-platform tooling? I honestly don't know, but given their history, my default assumption is to be skeptical. Why would you choose this over Go or Rust? (Rust is totally sweet for server dev, and I've spun up a few Rust servers for things.)

The Swift Open Source community is quite vibrant. They're already building it on Linux + macOS. See: https://github.com/apple/swift Edit: They also have a Platform Support page, where they discuss their goals/intentions on cross-platform: https://swift.org/about/#platform-support

There's quite a few windows developers out there as well for which I don't think we'll see Swift any time soon. In contrast Rust has fantastic windows support.

[edit]

Yup, no mention of win32 on that page at all.

Re: Pushing Swift to the Server

#49

Post by coldtea »

wmil wrote: post #31
echelon wrote: post #5

Is Swift on the server a good idea? I don't own (or plan to own) a Mac. Does Apple support cross-platform tooling? I honestly don't know, but given their history, my default assumption is to be skeptical. Why would you choose this over Go or Rust? (Rust is totally sweet for server dev, and I've spun up a few Rust servers for things.)

While Swift will compile on different backends now, XCode is still the premiere Swift dev environment and will be for a good while. So a non Mac Swift dev won't be having a great time. The target market is really iOS devs who want the same language on the back end. That's a perfectly reasonable engineering goal for an iOS-first shop. But they're a vocal group and like to hype up server Swift as the next big thing for…

>While Swift will compile on different backends now, XCode is still the premiere Swift dev environment and will be for a good while. So a non Mac Swift dev won't be having a great time

They won't have any worse time than someone using Go or Rust or D anywhere else..., that is, languages without "premiere Dev environments" and IDEs...

Re: Pushing Swift to the Server

#50

Post by coldtea »

thehardsphere wrote: post #35
kawsper wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The consultancy Nodes reports that their framework Vapor[0] that is written in Swift is "around 100 times faster" than other frameworks written in PHP, Ruby and Python, you can see his bold claim 4 minutes in here: https://vimeo.com/193549098 , but of course no benchmarks have been presented. [0] https://vapor.codes/

Even assuming it's true, that's not an impressive claim. Frameworks in those three languages are not known for their speediness. If they claimed 1000 times, maybe that would be something worth sitting up to take notice.

Because having 100 less resources with similarly convenient language is something to sneer at...
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