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by geodel 3476 days ago
Reading about Swift on server side and looking at Swift server dev mailing list. It appears to me that most appropriate use case of Swift on server side is Apple platform where client side is already written in Swift.

The server side group at Apple/IBM seems mostly looking for Swift wrappers around C/C++ core technology for sockets/http/ssl related work. This might be amply sufficient for Apple or IBM developing LOB apps in Swift but I do not see how it is very convenient for generic server side applications.
2 comments
fauigerzigerk 3476 days ago
I don't see how you can conclude from any of that what the most appropriate use case for Swift on the server side is. It's just what a couple of early adopters are talking about today.

For me, the case for Swift is that it is a modern language that doesn't waste half of the available memory on a tracing garbage collector.

The same goes for Rust, which has even more opportunities for low level optimization where necessary (and way superior string handling on top of it).

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geodel 3476 days ago
I can conclude that by looking at for example Go offers today vs effort of setting Swift web framework like Kitura. IMO it is far away from general purpose server side usage.

As far as memory usage goes Swift does not color me impressed when compared to GC'd language:

http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/compare.php?lan...

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fauigerzigerk 3476 days ago
Adoption is not the same as appropriateness at all.

As far as memory usage goes these benchmarks are completely irrelevant. They use very little memory and they measure it in a way that is unsuitable for a memory benchmark in the first place.

The problem with tracing garbage collection is that it requires a lot (~50%) of spare memory at all times to give the GC time to catch up without slowing the program down too much.

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geodel 3476 days ago
Sure, May be I am wrong and Swift will be just fine for server use cases.
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solidsnack9000 3475 days ago
> I can conclude that by looking at for example Go offers today...

This is the kind of argument that used to be trotted out all the time for Java and Perl before it. If we always went by what was offered today, we'd never use anything new.

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johnymontana 3476 days ago
What mailing list is that? I couldn't find it with a quick google search.
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geodel 3475 days ago
Here you go:

https://lists.swift.org/pipermail/swift-server-dev/

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