6 ms·

Its cool that you can run Swift on the server, but that sure does seem like a lot of hoops to jump through, coupled with equally many gotchas. No threading on L

by nxc18 10y ago

Its cool that you can run Swift on the server, but that sure does seem like a lot of hoops to jump through, coupled with equally many gotchas. No threading on Linux, NSUnimplemented all the time, no built in random, poorly implemented foundation types, etc. seem like a lot to deal with. It seems a more developed language/runtime (e.g. C#/F#/VB .NET or Java 8) would do a lot better with these specific requirements (typesafe, well-tooled, x-plat, server-side app) than Swift. Especially if you're going to be writing the UI in html/js/css and are thus not anchored to the Apple ecosystem anyway, Swift seems like a bizarre choice. The author seems to like xcode quite a bit, but I don't see it as more competitive or better than any other IDE. Not to mention it does window management and the like differently from everyone else, so when you're getting into it, it feels like you have to learn IDEs, and then you need to learn xcode. I also don't understand why people are so complacent about xcode crashing all the time - if VS Code or VS or Eclipse or IntelliJ ever crashed on me I'd be pretty darn upset.

matt4077 10y ago
I recently tried my hand in the macOS ecosystem and I must say I was positively surprised by XCode. It's "intellisence" is incredibly fast compared to VSCode. One argument for Swift is also that Swift is used on the client almost as often as Javascript is.
- untog 10y ago
  > One argument for Swift is also that Swift is used on the client almost as often as Javascript is. That can't be even slightly close to true. The amount of web code out there already dwarfs native iOS, and the majority of native iOS code out there is probably still in Objective C.
  - colechristensen 10y ago
    I think he's talking about the proportion of swift that runs on the frontend vs. backend. The comparison is like JS in your browser vs. node
holydude 10y ago
Exactly. Apple seems to not care about the backend developers (well why would they). They fall behind MS and Google (.NET and Golang).
mpweiher 10y ago
> lot of hoops to jump through, coupled with equally many gotchas In fact, it looks like a lot more gotchas than, for example, GNUStep...
tinus_hn 10y ago
If people like the Swift or Objective-C philosophy that's a good reason to use Swift on the server source. The author of the article appears to know how to use a hammer so he views anything as a nail though. From his statements he comes across as a beginner in programming websites.
codesternews 10y ago
I am iOS developer and I really wanted to say swift is headache and not a good language for Server development. I want to see how it goes but as far I know it is not flexible enough. I mean if you are building a production server you really do not want to think about language issues. Like dictionary is taking 4000ms to compile (yes it is true 4s) and compilation error message which has no link with what actual error or language syntax totally changed now you need to change million of lines of code to new syntax. It might be improved in future but for now I do not think it is time to swift as server language. I really like the language but for using it on server development nah. I need to wait for 10 minutes or more to compile my code. I am really frustated. I am solving for 2 days Xcode 8 issues beacause it compile slow and it is really frustating as a developer. It does not matter how I write code in a language but in swift 3 dictionaries are really mess and slow to compile and it's long way to go for swift. It's just my personal opinion.
- Apocryphon 10y ago
  Interesting. Do you think Swift isn't as good a language as Objective-C? Or a headache in what way?
  - codesternews 10y ago
    No Swift is great language and I did not like Objective-C. The headache in the sense compilation time and also shitty errors come and you do not know what that means. It's type safe language but all the type safety comes with price and some time the code written is just sucks. Json parsing is one example of this. All the casting and all that really make code horrible. In swift 3 they made all value types to Any and in iOS communicating between Cocoa frameworks become a really mess as all expect some objc type etc. Implicit conversion is also removed and now you have to cast String to NSString and I really mad about this my code now looks horrible huh....
    - mahyarm 10y ago
      Try Freddy, much less casting!
blub 10y ago
Using C#, F# or any .NET language for cross-platform server software would also be a bizarre choice when there's Java or Go which are mature and simply work.

by nxc18 10y ago

matt4077 10y ago

I recently tried my hand in the macOS ecosystem and I must say I was positively surprised by XCode. It's "intellisence" is incredibly fast compared to VSCode. One argument for Swift is also that Swift is used on the client almost as often as Javascript is.

untog 10y ago
> One argument for Swift is also that Swift is used on the client almost as often as Javascript is. That can't be even slightly close to true. The amount of web code out there already dwarfs native iOS, and the majority of native iOS code out there is probably still in Objective C.
- colechristensen 10y ago
  I think he's talking about the proportion of swift that runs on the frontend vs. backend. The comparison is like JS in your browser vs. node

holydude 10y ago

Exactly. Apple seems to not care about the backend developers (well why would they). They fall behind MS and Google (.NET and Golang).

mpweiher 10y ago

> lot of hoops to jump through, coupled with equally many gotchas In fact, it looks like a lot more gotchas than, for example, GNUStep...

tinus_hn 10y ago

If people like the Swift or Objective-C philosophy that's a good reason to use Swift on the server source. The author of the article appears to know how to use a hammer so he views anything as a nail though. From his statements he comes across as a beginner in programming websites.

codesternews 10y ago

I am iOS developer and I really wanted to say swift is headache and not a good language for Server development. I want to see how it goes but as far I know it is not flexible enough. I mean if you are building a production server you really do not want to think about language issues. Like dictionary is taking 4000ms to compile (yes it is true 4s) and compilation error message which has no link with what actual error or language syntax totally changed now you need to change million of lines of code to new syntax. It might be improved in future but for now I do not think it is time to swift as server language. I really like the language but for using it on server development nah. I need to wait for 10 minutes or more to compile my code. I am really frustated. I am solving for 2 days Xcode 8 issues beacause it compile slow and it is really frustating as a developer. It does not matter how I write code in a language but in swift 3 dictionaries are really mess and slow to compile and it's long way to go for swift. It's just my personal opinion.

Apocryphon 10y ago
Interesting. Do you think Swift isn't as good a language as Objective-C? Or a headache in what way?
- codesternews 10y ago
  No Swift is great language and I did not like Objective-C. The headache in the sense compilation time and also shitty errors come and you do not know what that means. It's type safe language but all the type safety comes with price and some time the code written is just sucks. Json parsing is one example of this. All the casting and all that really make code horrible. In swift 3 they made all value types to Any and in iOS communicating between Cocoa frameworks become a really mess as all expect some objc type etc. Implicit conversion is also removed and now you have to cast String to NSString and I really mad about this my code now looks horrible huh....
  - mahyarm 10y ago
    Try Freddy, much less casting!

blub 10y ago

Using C#, F# or any .NET language for cross-platform server software would also be a bizarre choice when there's Java or Go which are mature and simply work.