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Comment by sinatra | Hacker News Reader

This is good news (hoping the github link etc will start working in a day or two)! One side effect of swift being open sourced is that more developers will start looking at it for server side development. However, I personally think that Swift will continue to have strong reliance on Apple (esp considering that most external Swift developers will come from iOS development). So, till I see Apple showing interest in Swift getting used on server side, I'll not use it there.

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esp considering that most external Swift developers will come from iOS development

I am wondering about this. To me, it seems that there is still space for a modern, pragmatic language that compiles to native code. Coming from C and C++, I have been using Go recently for applications where garbage collection and some performance loss due to a relatively weak compiler is acceptable.

However, I still find the lack of parametric polymorphism tedious and annoying as well as other stuff you'd come to expect from a modern language (algebraic data types, non-nullable types, etc.).

Does anyone who has experience with Swift think that it could be a better language for the niches Go has gained traction? (Besides iOS/Mac development?)

Have a look at dlang and nim-Lang. Both answer that

I experimented with D ~2008-ish. IMO it's definitely superior to Go. The problem is that D is probably not going to gain critical mass anymore (I expect the same for Nim). This has an impact on its future ecosystem.

Since Swift is pushed by Apple, it probably won't suffer from the same ecosystem problems.

> (I expect the same for Nim). This has an impact on its future ecosystem.

What do you expect from a future ecosystem?

Nim has seamless integration with C as it compiles to C anyway, so there should be no concerns about that.

It's amazing that really powerful languages are never mainstream. Lisp, Ada, Ocaml, D and Nim will go their way in the future, they are just not as much in the focus of public attention as modern trends like Rust and Swift which are advertised by big organizations like Mozilla and Apple.

I have worked extensively with both Swift and Go. The currently available Swift implementation in Xcode is fairly closely tied to Cocoa (and hence OS X); I think this would be a serious barrier to generic server-side usage of Swift, so I'm curious to see if they have done anything about that (and what).

Otherwise, it's a fairly decent language. It doesn't have Go's concurrency baked in to the language, but on OS X you can use Grand Central Dispatch (libdispatch) which is a very decent concurrency library and it works very well with Swift, I'm hoping it will be available in the Linux port of Swift as well.

Besides the more sophisticated type system, a major advantage (or disadvantage, depending on how you look at it) of Swift over Go is it's memory management mechanism: it uses Automatic Reference Counting, which makes garbage collection more deterministic and efficient, at the expense of a certain level of overhead in the developer's thought process (e.g. the developer has to be mindful of things such as reference cycles etc).

It's not ready for production in this release according to the site but libdispatch and Foundation are both being ported which should speed up server side development on Linux.

Thanks for this info. Did you try, by any chance, Perfect (the Swift web FW)?

I think Swift is a viable competitor for C++ and Nim.

D won't be fully a player in that space until the GC is fully optional - meaning no library code causes the GC to run unexpectedly.

I'm excited about Swift for desktop/simulation/gaming/embedded development. I'm sure there'll be a Windows port in the near term as well.

Node.js made server side Javascript a reality, but it was done by outsiders using Google's V8 engine rather than by Google itself. What would be wrong with server side Swift being similarly pushed by a 3rd party?

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