Swift on the Server (2020)

https://theswiftdev.com/swift-on-the-server-in-2020/

by gozzoo • 5 years ago

101 101 5 years ago

qalmakka• 5 years ago

It's 2021 and Swift is still nowhere to be found in the repositories of any of the Linux distributions I usually use. It's a big PITA to install, with nothing comparable to `rustup` or even truly universal prepackaged binaries - the official website only offers plain .tar.gzs for either Ubuntu LTS or CentOS, or source code. It's nowhere to be found on FreeBSD either, but there's a .exe for Windows.

Until they expect a novice to download and unpack random archives and set up environments without any kind of support they really can't expect to get any kind of growth on Linux. There's definitely no shortage of new, interesting languages, and too often Swift's support for non-Apple platforms feels more like an afterthought than anything.

whatatita• 5 years ago

I would hapily give it a try with a `brew install swift` but any involved install process is off putting.

NobodyNada• 5 years ago

Homebrew requires the Xcode command-line tools, which includes the Swift toolchain. If you have `brew`, you already have Swift.

harikb• 5 years ago

+1. For non-apple usage, I would want to see lot more GitHub repos with open source support for Swift. Right now even Kotlin/Rust and others beat Swift in that respect.

I really like the language, but I don’t know what is holding it back. I wish it solved concurrency without async/await keywords - that would have been a killer feature to compete with Go

saghm• 5 years ago

I really like the language, but I don’t know what is holding it back

From my limited outsider perspective, it seems like Apple's unwillingness to go out of their way to support Linux is what's holding it back. There seem to be a large number of people interested in using Swift on the server, but without first-party support, Swift on Linux will always be playing catch up, as new features will always land on MacOS first and often not be designed with any regard to how they'll work on Linux.

pjmlp4• 5 years ago

Just like Objective-C, it is a language for Apple platforms and that is about it.

Try to use GNUStep to see how much an Apple language has managed to thrive outside of the ecosystem.

slezyr• 5 years ago

I'm not sure that you can call this "thrive"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Software_that_uses_GN...

Apocryphon• 5 years ago

Objective-C at least has Oolite as a cross-platform killer app to show off.

raydev3• 5 years ago

Did Apple ever support GNUStep or make an attempt for ObjC to work on Linux in this millenium?

Because they do have people focused on maintaining Swift support for Linux. So it's a bit different.

xbar• 5 years ago

I had similar troubles trying to find the Swift ecosystem. The author's opening statement that Swift is everywhere rang hollow, even if it might be technically not strictly false when viewed from a certain angle under the right lighting conditions.

So, I'm playing with Rust.

skohan• 5 years ago

Same. I love programming in Swift, but deploying it is a PITA. I got tired of waiting around for the cross-platform story to improve, so I moved on to Rust. It's refreshing to use tools which feel like they're made by someone who actually wants you to use them.

heavyset_go3• 5 years ago

Swift had a chance 6-7 years ago when it first came out to capture mindshare on platforms other than iOS and macOS, but that chance was squandered. There's absolutely no reason someone would choose Swift over even .NET Core on other platforms these days. Thankfully, other languages have excelled during that timeframe.

blario• 5 years ago

[deleted]

eecc3• 5 years ago

To be fair, the instructions on https://swift.org/download/#using-downloads are fairly straightforward and copy-pastable.

Indeed the prominence given to pgp signature verification is a breath of fresh air compared to the current wave of pipe-shell intros: it's not gatekeeping to ask a would-be programmer to exercise some reading skills and internalize the idea of signature verification.

iudqnolq2• 5 years ago

What's the point of signature verification if you get the signature and the binary from the same server? I appreciate the lack of pretenses of `curl | sudo bash`.

GoOnThenDoTell2• 5 years ago

It kinda implies that no one writes Unix tools in swift, otherwise it would already be packaged in the disto of your choice

herbst• 5 years ago

Being able to install something is only half of the issue. I wouldnt touch a language for production where i have to setup my environment myself completely without package control.

H_L• 5 years ago

Swift is absolutely an afterthought on non-Apple platforms.

Apple doesn't even provide ARM slices for the official Swift Docker images (https://hub.docker.com/_/swift?tab=tags) which makes server-side development on their own cutting-edge M1 (ARM) machines basically impossible.

_-david-_• 5 years ago

I am not sure which distros you use, but Swift is available in Fedora and EPEL (CentOS/RHEL) 8. The package name is swift-lang.

WesolyKubeczek• 5 years ago

I can’t understand why you’re being downvoted. Unless, of course, the HN crowd doesn’t like anyone putting spikes into myths it likes to perpetuate, like “installing Swift is involved on Linux”.

Hello, it’s “dnf install -y swift-lang”, how less involved does it have to get?

“Burn the heretic! It’s involved! I’d rather curl | sudo bash things all day!”

teh_klev• 5 years ago

The problem with EPEL is that it's not supported by Redhat, and the packages that reside there are, for want of a better phrase, ephemeral. There are no guarantees.

If you're after a long term and well supported solution then EPEL probably isn't for you. And the same goes for Fedora, which I personally use, but wouldn't run in production for anything mission critical.

Larrikin• 5 years ago

I like to think that Kotlin captured all the hopes that people had for swift that were dashed, but as an Android dev that loves using the language I sometimes can't tell if anyone cares for my favorite language or not.

arthur_sav• 5 years ago

It's kinda ironic for such a closed company to try to create a multiplatform language.

jonplackett2• 5 years ago

I love Swift. Especially the newer versions (swift 1 and 2 were so awful I gave up on it completely but 3+ are great).

But... I wouldn’t personally use it for anything other than iOS/Mac development because it’s always so hard to find examples / tutorials / help on stackoverflow for less-used languages and I imagine that’s what will be in store for me if I go this way.

cvwright2• 5 years ago

This is unfortunately true. I just wrote a very simple little web service in Vapor.

Vapor itself is fantastic, but for documentation and examples, you’re pretty much limited to (1) the Vapor docs (2) the Vapor API docs buried on GitHub and (3) the source code. Fortunately the source itself is pretty well organized and easy to follow.

jonplackett2• 5 years ago

How did you find it? Was it worth the extra effort VS using some other language?

GoOnThenDoTell2• 5 years ago

Does Apple use Swift (on Linux) for their own backend services?

yakkityyak• 5 years ago

Not really. It’s mostly Java and Go.

Longhanks• 5 years ago

How can you tell?

djxfade• 5 years ago

Doesn't the iTunes and App Store backend still run on WebOjbects?

danappelxx2• 5 years ago

Depends on the team, it’s a big company. There are definitely swift services internally.

qbasic_forever• 5 years ago

How's GRPC support for Swift? That to me is more of a tell if anyone is using it for internal infrastructure and services in big companies.

danappelxx2• 5 years ago

It’s pretty good, maintained by an Apple engineer. https://github.com/grpc/grpc-swift

slver2• 5 years ago

They use a lot of Java and Scala. But I'm sure it's inevitable some teams are dogfooding Swift on the server as well. Swift is a very nice language.

tracer4201• 5 years ago

I was looking for a language to dive deeper into, and I was going to pick between Swift or Rust. I ended up going with Rust. Why? I wanted something to replace C++ that I can write once and re use on Android or iOS. Also, I found lots of interesting projects where other people were using Rust. I don’t just jump the bandwagon, but I just didn’t see that much excitement for Swift or really understand it’s future as a general purpose language outside of Apple development.

And I love Objective C, but again, I only ever saw it being used for Mac and iOS.

sentinel2• 5 years ago

I've used Swift as the backend language for a side-project website around 2018-2019. I may be out of date, but I wouldn't recommend it. My main reasons:

1. The server-side frameworks are nascent and still changing – you will really be on the cutting edge if you use them, so be ready to deal with bugs and to change your project structure when the devs drop support for the old framework version.

2. Related to the above – not having a community around the frameworks means you'll have to figure a lot of stuff yourself – DB connection not working and throwing a weird error? You might not find that answer in SO.

3. It's a compiled language – so once you deploy, it can take up to 5+ minutes until the code is live; Swift (in iOS at least) doesn't have a good story around build times, so you're at the mercy of improvements in Swift development, probably coming from Apple (unless you get in the weeds and start setting up your own build chain)

4. Deployment – when I was working on the project, Heroku was the only platform that offered a stack for Swift, which they have since deprecated. I didn't feel like expending the effort to update to the new stack, and will probably re-write the backend. It's been a minute since last I worked with Swift, so maybe more platforms now offer (quick) Swift deployment.

It's a beautiful language and it has a lot of things going for it, but as far as server-side, I recommend sticking with boring technologies: RoR, Django, Node (which is what I'm using currently).

pixel_tracing• 5 years ago

A lot has changed and Vapor Swift community is alive and has made significant improvements. The Swift build pack for Heroku works fine. I’ve deployed a cluster of Swift services in Kubernetes. No issues so far for side projects.

sentinel2• 5 years ago

Glad to hear about the improvements! Swift is a great language, I hope to someday get back to using it.

Grustaf• 5 years ago

Yes the Vapor discord is very active and people are very helpful.

singularity2001• 5 years ago

It's such a shame Swift has such abysmal support outside Apple, because it is a thousand times more beautiful and pleasing than Rust (while offering _some_ of the safeguard mechanisms).

oscargrouch• 5 years ago

For me there's a sweet spot that is meant for languages like Java, C# and now Swift. For me at least Swift is the natural successor of this family of language for a bunch of reasons.

I would'nt create a program in C++ or Rust if i can do it in Swift, because its much more pleasant, productive and safer (while i love the level of control and speed C++ and Rust gives you).

I would just go for C++ or Rust if the domain i'm solving require this. Even because for some problem domains there are very few languages you can use. And i'm glad that now we have more options on this space like Rust and Zig.

But for business kind of languages, applications with common business logic, for me at least there's nothing better than Swift.

Script languages can be even better at ergonomics and productivity, but they tend to have a price that its only perceived later in regards to efficiency and the lack of a proper type system.

On the server side unfortunately, Swift is too late to the party and Go is already eating the Java cake. But i see a tremendous potential in Swift for user facing applications.

The_rationalist• 5 years ago

The sweet spot you're looking for is Kotlin.

cutler• 5 years ago

This guy is in denial. Swift has been dropped by IBM and by Google for Tensorflow and Apple doesn't appear to be doing much to promote Swift outside of iOS and MacOS.

slver2• 5 years ago

What does Swift have to do with Tensorflow. It's like comparing apples and oranges.

programmarchy• 5 years ago

There was a port in the works at one point.

agsnu• 5 years ago

After leaving Apple, Chris Lattner (designer of Swift) ended up at Google for a while and there was an attempt to make Swift a first class language for Tensorflow. An interesting podcast on the topic from 2019: https://www.swiftbysundell.com/podcast/58/

Since then he has moved on to SiFive and S4TF has been shutdown. See HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26117453

elpakal3• 5 years ago

to be fair, Swift for Tensorflow was dropped (Feb 21) way after this article was written (Aug 20) https://github.com/tensorflow/swift

pansa2• 5 years ago

But Swift for Tensorflow had been doomed for over a year before it was cancelled - from when Chris Lattner left Google in January 2020.

AndrewZM• 5 years ago

I just finished implementing a small service that talks to the stamps.com API and I have to say that its been really easy to implement. Deployment via Docker is really easy, for small services Vapor is just great. The Vapor Discord community is absolutely fenomenal.

rnantes• 5 years ago

If you look on the Swift GitHub page you will see tremendous effort going into async/await. It will change the game for server side swift later this year.

k_bx3• 5 years ago

I don’t know how Swift works, but from my Haskell experience, if your language needs async/await —- it’s already failing. Everything is async in Haskell, so you don’t need to think about it, and cannot accidentally make a mistake by blocking your async thread by calling sync code from it.

nextaccountic• 5 years ago

Everything is async in Haskell, so you don’t need to think about it,

Then why does https://hackage.haskell.org/package/async exist?

elpakal3• 5 years ago

this! lack of proper async support has been a big deterrent for me when considering Swift on my server or even Docker/CLI project. I worried that things like SwiftNIO/Vapor would change significantly when async landed and would require a lot of upkeep... I look forward to async landing.

spideymans• 5 years ago

I love Swift. It's my favourite language for application development. It's terrible that it's effectively restricted to Apple platforms.

mark_l_watson2• 5 years ago

Nice, thanks for writing that up!

Swift is a great all purpose language. Before Google dropped the Swift TensorFlow project, I had started writing a “Swift AI” book. I bailed on the book, and instead have a live-book GitHub repo with code and README files for the various non-TensorFlow projects (which I tossed out to /dev/null). The live book is at https://github.com/mark-watson/Swift-AI-live-book-and-code

liuliu2• 5 years ago

Do you want to take a look at https://github.com/liuliu/s4nnc/ ? Nothing to serious though.

mark_l_watson2• 5 years ago

Thanks, that looks useful.

neilv• 5 years ago

Swift on the server might make sense for an Apple-only full-stack developer, who wants to remain Apple-only, who is happy with the Swift development experience on the frontend, and who is willing to bet their backend on Apple's developer support.

(I'd use Rust, Flask, Node, Go, Scheme, Elixir, or a variety of other platforms/approaches first.)

danschumann2• 5 years ago

my main concern would be google searches.

how do i do xyz in swift? results: "Taylor Swift is now dating small town midwest boy"

bartvk2• 5 years ago

That is barely a concern. Do you feel the same for Go, or Rust, or Bash?

danschumann2• 5 years ago

Yea.

johnthuss• 5 years ago

I’m surprised the article didn’t mention Apple’s own swift HTTP server that builds on its NIO library. If I was going to write a Swift server I’d start with that.

https://github.com/apple/swift-nio-http2

eyelidlessness• 5 years ago

There are plenty of good reasons in the discussion already why server-side Swift might be a risky choice. I’ll add one more.

I like Swift. I’d like to use it more. Most of my work is either web backend or web frontend or both. My only Swift experience is from developing personal use Mac apps. But I do like the language.

[The biggest thing holding me back from even trying out a weekend project with server-side Swift is the fact that the only weekend project server-side work I have in mind is specifically oriented around improving on TypeScript/Node offerings.]

But the next reason after that is that Apple just isn’t invested in server platforms generally. This is similar but slightly different from the several comments about Apple not investing in other platforms.

Apple only tangentially invests any effort into Windows support to benefit the iOS/macOS platforms, true. But their only motivation to support Linux is gated by the extent to which they might want to focus on server products or cloud platform products in general.

They categorically don’t show much interest. Their own networked products use a hodgepodge of whatever was probably most convenient: some AWS, some Azure, some Google Cloud; a huge smattering of languages; some in house stuff, a lot not; a hilarious history of offering server hardware and letting it languish.

They want SwiftUI to be the future successor to the Cocoa APIs, and it’s been notoriously undocumented. What pain lies for people trying to use the language for use cases they actually don’t care about?

akoncius• 5 years ago

for me personally main thing what is putting me off from Swiftlang is lack of namespaces (packages) :( all these workarounds with enums to provide some kind of namespacing look like workarounds rather than proper solutions how to organize bigger codebase.

Tainnor• 5 years ago

My team and I ran a rather complex backend application written in Swift for several years in production.

There are nice things about the language, but so many things are missing, poorly supported or just extremely annoying.

A teammate wrote a summary of the myriad issues we had: https://forums.swift.org/t/issues-learned-4-years-with-serve... I could probably add a half dozen more things.

I am now working with Kotlin and it's such a delight in comparison.

chrismsimpson• 5 years ago

Swift is inherently tied to the Obj-C runtime and messaging system (and GCD), which is OLD (read: Darwin/NextStep). The Windows and Linux ports have large swathes of this low level infrastructure either missing or replaced with platform specific shims. This isn’t even to say anything of GUI toolkits etc.

Apple likely doesn’t use these ports of Swift for anything other than bragging rights to say it open sourced a thing.

GCD has been open sourced for a long time, but I’m not sure these concurrency primitives even work fully or as expected outside of an Apple OS with Swift. Hence Swift is essentially half baked abandonware on said platforms.

I love Swift, but it has no compelling use case out of Cupertino.

Swift on the Server (2020)

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