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by niklasrde 3476 days ago
He seems to be a pretty happy iOS developer. He likes Swift as a language (and I must say having used it in frontend dev it does have some very nice things many other languages often used for server-side development don't come with), and he loves XCode as an IDE. If for their personal use-case it does the job and isn't missing major libraries or so, I don't think why such an endeavour shouldn't be supported?

I don't think it's so much about sharing libraries - consuming and creating data is quite different, and backend and frontend work probably shouldn't be duplicated.

NB: Some of those 'features' I mean are: - Strongly typed (compared to JS, Python, Ruby..) - Compiles to binary which could bring benefits depending on your needs (compared to JS, Java, Scala..) - Being very new, there's little 'legacy sillyness' in Swift 3. Comparing some PHP sites to Swift projects (Frontend, we don't use it in any backend applications yet) I can tell you which one I'd rather work with.
2 comments
echelon 3476 days ago
Both Go and Rust fit into the same niche you mentioned (statically typed, single binary, no "legacy silliness"). Both currently support the server use case better as they have more libraries and stronger concurrency primitives available. Neither has the disadvantage of poor Linux support.

While I can understand why an iOS developer might spring for using Swift for server development, I'm not sure why any backend engineer would choose Swift. There are a myriad of better choices, including those that you ruled out.

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bigdubs 3475 days ago
You basically completed my original comment with much better clarity.

This is what I was driving at.

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shagie 3475 days ago
> Compiles to binary which could bring benefits depending on your needs (compared to JS, Java, Scala..)

While its not there _yet_, JEP 295: Ahead-of-Time Compilation ( http://openjdk.java.net/jeps/295 ) is active, it was just updated last week, is targeted and a priority 1 item. I have reasonable confidence that it will get there in the near future.

See also: JVMLS 2015 - Java Goes AOT https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xybzyv8qbOc

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