Re:Introducing Swift Service Lifecycle
by shehryarrr on Thursday July 16, 2020 @11:25AM
(#23859926)
IBM stopped working on their own framework Kitura. Vapor has become the dominant framework since then and Apple is still investing more in making server-side Swift better. I have heard rumors that Netflix is running some services using server-side Swift, obviously unconfirmed.
I think Apple is pushing for the same thing that helped NodeJS get really popular: using the same language across your entire stack. In a perfect world Apple can have their devs use Swift to build an iOS/macOS app or help out with server-side code also written in Swift. For a company their size it could really pay off. I think Google had the same vision with Go but ultimately failed (imo).
As an iOS developer I'm really excited to use Swift more and more outside of app development.
edit: to clarify a bit more, I think Apple's vision is a lot more than just being able to build a small web app in Swift. They really want to build _everything_ with it.
Google had no vision with Go, it was just a group of well known developers in the UNIX world that got fed up waiting for their C++ compile times, with a supporting manager that decided to fund their work.
Google is pretty much Java and C++ alongside their infrastructure, and OSes.
K8s prototype was started in Java and migrated to Go after some Go aficionados joined the team.
Besides k8s, you have Google download service (because someone from Go team bothered to port the service to Go), gVisor, parts of Android GAPI, the new internal Android build system, gVisor, and Fuchsia TCP/IP stack that apparently should be rewritten in C++/Rust.
And that is about it, as much as it comes outside.
Tom Doron is a member of the Swift Core Team and the Swift Server Work Group. He manages a team working on server-side Swift libraries at Apple.
Server Side Swift ? At Apple?
I thought IBM gave up on working Server Side Swift and that was it.