Hacker News Reader

Comment by mathverse | Hacker News Reader

It is sad that this language is almost useless for anything else than osx/ios apps.

https://vapor.codes/ brings Swift to the server and it's quite good! Wrap that in docker and you can be running Swift anywhere pretty quickly.

And with async/await, server side Swift is really nice now. The old stuff with eventloops and SwiftNIO was painful.

Now it feels almost like writing Python, only with a real type system and not slow.

Has Vapor fully shifted to async/await ?

Yes! And it's fantastic.

Nice! Going to give it a go.

I stopped using Swift before version 5, and async/await was always something I missed there and a big reason I liked Javascript. I can't believe how much developer time was wasted on promises and callbacks in so many languages. Good that Swift has async/await now.

Is it, really? I mean, it's Turing-complete, nice to use, quite fast... I don't see a reason not to reach for Swift if I want to do some reasonably generic data crunching (instead of say, Java, C++, Crystal or similar languages).

Finally, a Turing-complete language!

I used swift till 2.x, and it’s really sad that Apple missed the opportunity and didn’t wanted to promote swift outside their ecosystem, if they did that, for sure swift will be up there competing with nodejs, rails, go, rust, etc in the backend space, it was really new refreshing language.

Because I stopped using it, I don’t know how much the language changed and how it compares with go/rust in terms of performance, I would bet that it is bear go performance at least, knowing Apple seems to care about it.

Many developers are more than happy living in a pure Apple ecosystem, it is a big enough crowd.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com