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IBM Stops Server Side Swift Framework Development

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Re: IBM Stops Server Side Swift Framework Development

#41

Post by mythz »

mhd wrote: post #37
mythz wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah they're mentions because it's being done in small niches (there's also Ruby/Haxe + many other transpile to JS languages), I just think they'll always lag behind the other popular and well supported contenders listed. I could be wrong but that's my impression after having worked on all of them which all provide decent development development experiences and end results - though they vary in strength amongst the d…

So you list Dart as being well supported on the server side? Did I miss some killer app/framework recently?

It may not have the popularity but it has a well resourced technical team behind its development resulting in the Dart VM being a highly tuned technically brilliant piece of engineering. It has great support for server scenarios like gRPC [1] which I'd imagine is a popular back-end for Flutter iOS/Android Apps which is my personal #1 pick atm for native cross-plat iOS/Android development.

I was an early adopter and saw promise in Dart based on the strength of its technical team (originally led by Lars Bak, Kasper Lund, Gilad Bracha, Bob Nystrom, etc) so invested a lot of time in developing a express-like web framework [2], Jade View Engine [3], Redis Client [4], JSON Client, etc. It had a nice/clean development experience, well-designed / fast libraries and APIs even back then, but abandoned it 6 years ago after going to work full-time on my own Startup and have been out of the loop of Dart VM/Server since then. Here's a short list of Dart web server frameworks I could find after a quick Google Search:

https://medium.com/@suragch/web-server-frameworks-for-dart-1...

Looks like Aqueduct [6] is the most popular at 1.4k stars, though I'd expect Dart Server is not going to see a major uptick until Google commits to a major project initiative like they're doing with Flutter & Angular Dart. So it might only see traction as a Dart gRPC server which can still provide an end-to-end development experience with SPA development with Angular Dart / gRPC Web / gRPC Dart and Flutter / gRPC Dart which I'll also add after having gone through a comparison of gRPC clients in different languages [6], Dart has basically the nicest async development experience [7].

[1] https://grpc.io/docs/quickstart/dart/

[2] https://github.com/dartist/express

[3] https://github.com/dartist/jaded

[4] https://github.com/dartist/redis_client

[5] https://github.com/stablekernel/aqueduct

[6] https://github.com/NetCoreApps/todo-world/tree/master/src/cl...

[7] https://github.com/NetCoreApps/todo-world/blob/master/src/cl...

Re: IBM Stops Server Side Swift Framework Development

#42

Post by unpluggedcord »

Apocryphon wrote: post #31
wwright wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an Apple fan and a programming language nerd, I have basically no interest in ever using the language. I spend a lot of time in C++, Haskell, Rust, and Kubernetes, but Swift just feels pointlessly complicated to me. (C++ I think is also pointlessly complicated, but the rest at least have a point ;-)

To the sibling comments, here are some prior threads about other critiques of Swift: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17278175 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15421073 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13655125

FWIW those comment sections are talking about swift 2 and swift 3. Which are considerably older and lacking many features that clean up those concerns.

Re: IBM Stops Server Side Swift Framework Development

#43

Post by xvilka »

woadwarrior01 wrote: post #10
thrower123 wrote: post #7

Outside of iOS, is there really any traction for Swift development? It certainly feels like it is settling into an also-ran position. And really, mobile apps are turning out to be a dead-end, and people don't seem to be actually investing in native clients anymore, they just slap their website in a browser control.

The creator of Swift (and LLVM), Chris Lattner now works for Google. There’s already an experimental version of Tensorflow[1] for Swift. I personally believe that Swift will really shine in differentiable programming and thus machine learning. A little over a decade ago, most of the machine learning community was using either Matlab (and it’s open source clone Octave) or R. It took a long time for the machine learnin…

Julia is better suited for differentiable programming and machine learning. Something like frontend/scripting with Julia, and computing cores with Rust, as an alternative to the ubiquitous Python + C/C++ stack. And there are already more or less established frameworks for Julia:

- FluxML[1] for machine learning

- Zygote[2] for differentiable programming

- Turing[3] for probabilistic programming

- Rich support for GPU[4]

[1] https://fluxml.ai/

[2] https://fluxml.ai/Zygote.jl/latest/

[3] https://turing.ml

[4] https://juliagpu.org/

Re: IBM Stops Server Side Swift Framework Development

#44

Post by yangikan »

mythz wrote: post #17

Pretty clear signal that there's low appetite for full stack development in Swift. What are other promising future "end-to-end" (i.e. Web / Server / Mobile) development platforms are there? IMO these are the main contenders: - JS / node.js / React Native (Android/iOS) (+ other transpile 2 JS langs, e.g. TypeScript, Clojure, Scala, OCaml, etc) - Kotlin to JavaScript / JVM / Android / Kotlin Native (iOS) - C# Blazor /…

How about Python based frameworks? Django/Flask? I know they are not suitable for Mobile..

Re: IBM Stops Server Side Swift Framework Development

#45

Post by mrits »

tessting wrote: post #40
mythz wrote: post #17

Pretty clear signal that there's low appetite for full stack development in Swift. What are other promising future "end-to-end" (i.e. Web / Server / Mobile) development platforms are there? IMO these are the main contenders: - JS / node.js / React Native (Android/iOS) (+ other transpile 2 JS langs, e.g. TypeScript, Clojure, Scala, OCaml, etc) - Kotlin to JavaScript / JVM / Android / Kotlin Native (iOS) - C# Blazor /…

Is Kotlin Native any good?

I just started looking into and according to a few of my sources it isn't ready for primetime due to crashing issues and other problems with linux kernel versions

Re: IBM Stops Server Side Swift Framework Development

#46

Post by mythz »

yangikan wrote: post #44
mythz wrote: post #17

Pretty clear signal that there's low appetite for full stack development in Swift. What are other promising future "end-to-end" (i.e. Web / Server / Mobile) development platforms are there? IMO these are the main contenders: - JS / node.js / React Native (Android/iOS) (+ other transpile 2 JS langs, e.g. TypeScript, Clojure, Scala, OCaml, etc) - Kotlin to JavaScript / JVM / Android / Kotlin Native (iOS) - C# Blazor /…

How about Python based frameworks? Django/Flask? I know they are not suitable for Mobile..

Yeah Python is a clear powerhouse on the server, but as its weak a target in browsers & mobiles I didn't list it as a candidate for end-to-end development.

Re: IBM Stops Server Side Swift Framework Development

#47

Post by briandear »

mythz wrote: post #17

Pretty clear signal that there's low appetite for full stack development in Swift. What are other promising future "end-to-end" (i.e. Web / Server / Mobile) development platforms are there? IMO these are the main contenders: - JS / node.js / React Native (Android/iOS) (+ other transpile 2 JS langs, e.g. TypeScript, Clojure, Scala, OCaml, etc) - Kotlin to JavaScript / JVM / Android / Kotlin Native (iOS) - C# Blazor /…

Except all the people doing full stack swift tended to have gravitated towards Vapor. This IBM thing is a signal of nothing.

Re: IBM Stops Server Side Swift Framework Development

#48

Post by banachtarski »

mythz wrote: post #17

Pretty clear signal that there's low appetite for full stack development in Swift. What are other promising future "end-to-end" (i.e. Web / Server / Mobile) development platforms are there? IMO these are the main contenders: - JS / node.js / React Native (Android/iOS) (+ other transpile 2 JS langs, e.g. TypeScript, Clojure, Scala, OCaml, etc) - Kotlin to JavaScript / JVM / Android / Kotlin Native (iOS) - C# Blazor /…

Prediction: React Native will be dead in 3 years.

Re: IBM Stops Server Side Swift Framework Development

#49

Post by [deleted] »

veidr wrote: post #3

Two guys that IBM was paying to work on server-side Swift are stepping down from the server working group (presumably because IBM decided not to pay them to do that anymore). I think these guys were best known for Kitura, the (previously) IBM-backed web app framework. I don't do web apps in Swift "for realz" (I use TypeScript and tools like Angular and Koa.js for that kind of thing), but I do use Swift on Linux and h…

[deleted]

Re: IBM Stops Server Side Swift Framework Development

#50

Post by thomasfortes »

k__ wrote: post #34
mythz wrote: post #17

Pretty clear signal that there's low appetite for full stack development in Swift. What are other promising future "end-to-end" (i.e. Web / Server / Mobile) development platforms are there? IMO these are the main contenders: - JS / node.js / React Native (Android/iOS) (+ other transpile 2 JS langs, e.g. TypeScript, Clojure, Scala, OCaml, etc) - Kotlin to JavaScript / JVM / Android / Kotlin Native (iOS) - C# Blazor /…

Maybe OCaml/Reason?

I love ocaml/reason and write a fair amount of code in both (both native and to javascript with bucklescript), but as a backend server the ocaml native ecosystem is far from ideal.

If I was asked to do a full stack project with reason today I would write node bindings and use them.

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