I wish more effort were being made to make it a first class citizen on non-Apple platforms. With the popularity it has enjoyed, it could easily challenge the likes of Go, Python or even Java for server side programming.
This type of model is fine and has worked quite well in the past. It is not event loop like node, nor light threads ( like go), nor actors like erlang, but it does work fine. And since swift is fast, it'll probably work just a fine as your python / ruby / node backend.
What we're looking for for the future of swift is something better / safer than that. But my personnal conclusion is that it shouldn't prevent you from building regular webservice api with this language.
Posting a job ( aka function call) on a queue for async programming is also very very easy.
There's nothing like coroutines or channels though. So you're back to mutex and OS thread constraints in terms of the number of spawnable threads.
Imho that's just the description of event loop(s). There's a central queue, to which you post work (e.g. in the form of function objects or closures), which will get dequeued and executed in a serialized fashion. The thread look like while ((func = dequeue()) != null) { func(); }. That's the event loop.
The difference to node is that you have multiple of these event loops, which are referred to by queue name. In javascript there's only one single implicit loop. If we look at javascript which webworkers we also get multiple loops and queues (one in each worker). However those are more strongly isolated (no shared memory) than eventloops in multithreaded environments.
Once both ABI stability and a native concurrency model have been implemented, Swift would be in an even stronger position to take on these languages. I'm not sure that's the sole reason a stronger push hasn't been made yet, but waiting another few years to go after this goal would in some ways be tactful.
And the Swift community itself needs to work on making it officially available on more platforms. Officially, the only non-Apple platform that is supported is Ubuntu -- not Linux, Ubuntu. It runs on other distributions, but having “official” support for more platforms would be a big step towards acceptability. Most people I've talked to still consider Swift on Linux an experiment. Even C#/.Net Core seem to be more popular on Linux.
Having Windows support would make the language more acceptable by cross platform developers -- leading to more high quality libraries being written.
import Vapor
let drop = try Droplet()
drop.get("hello") { req in
return "Hello, world."
}
try drop.run()I would also note that saying "I wish more effort were being made" is a bit entitled when you're talking about an open source project. No one working on any open source project owes you anything. If you want the project to get better then find a way to contribute.
no, "i wish" just means "i wish". it doesn't imply anything like "being owed".
being "open source" doesn't establish carte blanche to oblige everyone to labor on the project if they dared to have a thought or opinion.
> If you want the project to get better then find a way to contribute.
there are thousands of projects i'd like to see get better. not everyone has the time, ability, desire or capacity to implement everything they've ever wished for. this is just silly.
More importantly, it needs to happen while Swift still has momentum. Once a language gets old enough, it builds a certain kind of reputation. Once that happens, it is almost impossible to introduce it into new domains.
You can take a look at what IBM has been doing in this space, but in general I'm not sure what you are asking for. Do you expect Apple to release a fully-baked Windows port?
It's a free project that is open-source. Cross-platform support will come from contributions by individual developers, testers, and documentation writers, or companies who find some strategic value in supporting it.
Sitting back and saying "I wish" seems a bit entitled, no? I'm not being glib, I really am saying if you want to see better Swift support on platform X then start contributing. Swift Foundation needs help filling out implementations on Linux and Windows. For the more adventurous you can contribute directly to the standard library or compiler.
“I wish it would stop raining.”
“I wish they'd launch it soon.”
Do any of these statements mean the speaker is entitled to something? Since when did wishing for something become a bad thing?
I am not expecting Apple to release anything. I am hoping for swift.org to one day proclaim that the toolchain and the libraries are available on Windows and other platforms. What I am expecting Apple to do is get behind its own language. I mentioned in another post in this thread -- it is not just about technical work. A lot of it has to do with marketing/evangalism. While individual contributors can help, it takes the backing of large company to get something adopted at a large scale. Why do you think Go succeeded while languages like Nim, D etc are not being adopted as well? What I expect from Apple is to spare a couple of people for the purpose of giving talks, writing blogs etc in addition to working on Swift -- something like what Rob Pike et al have been doing for Go. From what I understand, Apple writes a lot of their backend stuff in Java. Perhaps they could start investing in Swift on server side and open source some of the frameworks/libraries they come up with?
> I really am saying if you want to see better Swift support on platform X then start contributing.
I want to get Swift adopted at my workplace for the next project we are working on. I should tell the management I'll start working on it as soon as I get Swift ported to the platform I use. It would go down really well.
What makes you assume I am not contributing in whatever way I can?
> You can take a look at what IBM has been doing in this space, but in general I'm not sure what you are asking for.
IBM has done some good work, alright. But they are the only ones. A lot more work is required If Sipwift were to become a mainstream language.