I hope this helps people to consider Swift 6 as a viable option for server-side development, since it offers many of the modern safety features of Rust, including simpler memory management through ARC, compared to Rust’s more complex ownership system and more predictable than Go's garbage collector.

I'd love to use Swift on Cloudflare Workers, but SwiftWASM doesn't seem production ready whereas Rust just works (mostly) on workers. Swift on AWS Lambda looks promising though.

There are lots of sane alternatives to Go. Also don't bet on ARC for performance.

https://github.com/ixy-languages/ixy-languages

Is using something other than XCode viable? I'd love to do more with swift but I hate that IDE.

If you're a Jetbrains user, they have their AppCode IDE.

That was discontinued in 2022.

Most editors will do, Xcode is mostly needed for iOS / macOS development if you want to submit to the App Store or work with a lot of Apple frameworks.

There is a Swift LSP. See - https://github.com/swiftlang/sourcekit-lsp

VS Code?

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=sswg.swi...

Have you used it recently, on an M series Mac? I used to feel the same, it was sluggish and crashed frequently. It's become usable now, even pleasant to use. Also it's great they support Vim keybindings now out-of-the-box.

It's worth keeping in mind that these AI machines run an environment very similar to Mac OS, XNU kernel and all, and are powered by Apple Silicon. Using Swift in that context makes sense.

At least according to what we publicly know, no other backend Apple services follow this model.

What do we know about apples other backend services? I’ve worked in compute infra in big tech for 8 years and I don’t know anything about apple’s backend.

Apple has a lot of Java WebObjects running on old Unix servers