Re:Ask HN: Now open source, what will you use swift for?
by dozzie on Monday June 08, 2015 @02:42PM
(#9681254)
It will in more or less the same amount as Objective-C, meaning, it actually
won't.
ObjC suffered greatly from not having a standard container library. What
delivered GNUstep was far, far too little for widespread use, and you needed
to actually pull in the whole framework.
And it's not obvious how would Swift interact with C or C++ libraries
(meaning: ABI and/or an equivalent of FFI).
All in all, I don't see any reason at all to use Swift as a server-side
language. Extracting it from MacOS simply cripples it too much, and the
language itself adds virtually nothing to the landscape.
ObjC suffered greatly from not having a standard container library. What delivered GNUstep was far, far too little for widespread use, and you needed to actually pull in the whole framework.
Even if Swift will have a container library, it has tough competition that was carried though designing phase, with the result of not being composed purely of edge cases (http://blog.metaobject.com/2015/05/i-am-jealous-of-swift.htm...).
And it's not obvious how would Swift interact with C or C++ libraries (meaning: ABI and/or an equivalent of FFI).
All in all, I don't see any reason at all to use Swift as a server-side language. Extracting it from MacOS simply cripples it too much, and the language itself adds virtually nothing to the landscape.