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Pushing Swift to the Server

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Re: Pushing Swift to the Server

#91

Post by mderazon »

tgragnato wrote: post #21
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 the clever design of the language: coding with optionals is a breeze, it defaults to thread-safe reference counting, a cleaner syntax (IMHO only), .... . For the unifying potential of the language: swift on the server (currently linux / freebsd limited), swift on mobile (Google seems to be moving in this direction too), swift on the desktop (macOS only).

> Google seems to be moving in this direction too Source ?

Re: Pushing Swift to the Server

#92

Post by SiVal »

mahyarm wrote: post #89
valuearb wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been developing on iOS for 7 years and Swift for 3. (Half of my 8 store APIs are in Swift) While I agree with most of your criticisms I'll say it's never taken me more than an hour to update any code base when Swift versions change, it's a mostly automatic process. Also I'd say anyone doing iOS development in Objective C instead Swift nowadays is doing themselves a grave mis-service. It's much easier and faster…

Apple's target is the 1-5 person developer team with maybe 50kloc of code & 1 mac mini acting as a CI box. Xcode scales ok in these cases. Backend development tends to feature a lot more developers with a lot more code. Swift starts getting really painful when you hit those numbers. Go look at presentations done by larger swift codebases like linked-in, uber, lyft & airbnb to see where it starts happening.

Of course, all dev gets more painful with more devs and larger code, so I assume you're saying that it increases more steeply with Swift than with...what? Java maybe? Or something else that the presentations you mention were comparing it to?

Re: Pushing Swift to the Server

#93

Post by mahyarm »

SiVal wrote: post #92
mahyarm wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple's target is the 1-5 person developer team with maybe 50kloc of code & 1 mac mini acting as a CI box. Xcode scales ok in these cases. Backend development tends to feature a lot more developers with a lot more code. Swift starts getting really painful when you hit those numbers. Go look at presentations done by larger swift codebases like linked-in, uber, lyft & airbnb to see where it starts happening.

Of course, all dev gets more painful with more devs and larger code, so I assume you're saying that it increases more steeply with Swift than with...what? Java maybe? Or something else that the presentations you mention were comparing it to?

Objective-C, Objective-C++, Java, Javascript/Node, Python, Ruby, Golang, C++, C, C#. Build times increase significantly, the indexer takes 15-30m, sourcekit crashes, xcode UX freezes for 5s repeatedly, the debugger cannot print values when you hit a break point. On and on and on.

Re: Pushing Swift to the Server

#94

Post by DopamineHigh »

mderazon wrote: post #91
tgragnato wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the clever design of the language: coding with optionals is a breeze, it defaults to thread-safe reference counting, a cleaner syntax (IMHO only), .... . For the unifying potential of the language: swift on the server (currently linux / freebsd limited), swift on mobile (Google seems to be moving in this direction too), swift on the desktop (macOS only).

> Google seems to be moving in this direction too Source ?

Here's the original article that sparked this claim. They say that "Sources tell The Next Web".

https://thenextweb.com/dd/2016/04/07/google-facebook-uber-sw...

Re: Pushing Swift to the Server

#95

Post by echelon »

hacker_9 wrote: post #8
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.)

Why would it matter if it was cross platform if it is running on a server?

It matters that the same development tooling is available on Linux.

Re: Pushing Swift to the Server

#96

Post by tgragnato »

mderazon wrote: post #91
tgragnato wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the clever design of the language: coding with optionals is a breeze, it defaults to thread-safe reference counting, a cleaner syntax (IMHO only), .... . For the unifying potential of the language: swift on the server (currently linux / freebsd limited), swift on mobile (Google seems to be moving in this direction too), swift on the desktop (macOS only).

> Google seems to be moving in this direction too Source ?

The press made a lot of fuss about this claim. Unfortunately we have no confirmations nor denials, it would be nice to hear an internal about this.

http://thehackernews.com/2016/04/android-swift-programming.h...

http://www.dday.it/redazione/19590/app-android-scritte-con-s...

http://www.webnews.it/2016/04/08/google-apple-swift-android/

http://android.hdblog.it/n429420/Google-Swift-di-Apple-lingu...

https://www.tomshw.it/android-google-pensa-swift-apple-posto...

Re: Pushing Swift to the Server

#98

Post by babuskov »

Entangled wrote: post #57

For Swift on the server you only need an editor like Sublime, Atom, or whatever suits your fancy. That's it, nothing else. Get one of the most popular frameworks like Kitura, Vapor, Perfect, Zewo or the dozens of smaller ones and be ready to deploy to Heroku, Bluemix, AWS, Google Cloud, Digital Ocean in no time. It is that simple, tested, proven, it works, it simply works. In just a couple of weeks I developed a coup…

> http://pokerduel.herokuapp.com

Doesn't seem to work with the latest Firefox version on Mac. It loads, but clicking does nothing.

Re: Pushing Swift to the Server

#100

Post by dang »

jayd16 wrote: post #16
tyingq wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similar for (roughly) "we ran one benchmark and can now say that swift is similar to java in performance and uses half the memory generally, for all things". No reference to the benchmark either.

The reference was shown in the slide. Here is the link: http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/spectralnorm.ht...

The site owner asked us to replace the original URL you had with a static one in the hope of taking some strain off the web server, so we've done that. I hope that's ok.
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