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Anyone using Swift for web backend? I looked into Vapor but it seems much slower than it should be for a compiled language.

by pier25 1y ago

open592 1y ago
The speed is less correlated with the language it’s implemented in, and more with the amount of man hours spent building and optimizing it. Vapor is a very small project, and thus is slower then other larger more mature projects.
desertmonad 1y ago
I've used vapor as a side project API. For anything new and only on Apple ecosystem, its simpler to just go with SwiftData and CloudKit though.
miffy900 1y ago
I tried seeing how it ranks on the 2025 tech empower benchmarks: https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r23&l=v2ornh-pa7 https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r23&l=v... And up against C#, Go and C++, Vapor could not make the top 70. Even just compare Swift vs PHP and its a really poor showing for vapor: https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r23&l=v2qi2n-pa7 https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r23&l=v...
- pier25 1y ago
  It gets worse results than Laravel which is something.
- belmont_sup 1y ago
  Probably a bad benchmark. I see that a recent blog post on the swift site discusses a migration of a large service from Java to swift using vapor.
zffr 1y ago
https://www.swift.org/blog/swift-at-apple-migrating-the-password-monitoring-service-from-java/ https://www.swift.org/blog/swift-at-apple-migrating-the-pass...
ofrzeta 1y ago
How is this possible? Here they say it's fast: https://www.swift.org/blog/how-swifts-server-support-powers-things-cloud/ https://www.swift.org/blog/how-swifts-server-support-powers-...
pharaohgeek 1y ago
I'm using it on my most recent projects and have had a great experience. It doesn't have the ecosystem of a language like Java, which can be frustrating, but it certainly handles 90% of my needs out of the box. I've never had a performance issue with Vapor. Compile times can be a bit slow if you have a lot of dependencies, but runtime performance has been great.

Anyone using Swift for web backend? I looked into Vapor but it seems much slower than it should be for a compiled language.

by pier25 1y ago

Anyone using Swift for web backend? I looked into Vapor but it seems much slower than it should be for a compiled language.

open592 1y ago

The speed is less correlated with the language it’s implemented in, and more with the amount of man hours spent building and optimizing it. Vapor is a very small project, and thus is slower then other larger more mature projects.

desertmonad 1y ago

I've used vapor as a side project API. For anything new and only on Apple ecosystem, its simpler to just go with SwiftData and CloudKit though.

miffy900 1y ago

I tried seeing how it ranks on the 2025 tech empower benchmarks: https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r23&l=v2ornh-pa7 https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r23&l=v... And up against C#, Go and C++, Vapor could not make the top 70. Even just compare Swift vs PHP and its a really poor showing for vapor: https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r23&l=v2qi2n-pa7 https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r23&l=v...

pier25 1y ago
It gets worse results than Laravel which is something.
belmont_sup 1y ago
Probably a bad benchmark. I see that a recent blog post on the swift site discusses a migration of a large service from Java to swift using vapor.

zffr 1y ago

https://www.swift.org/blog/swift-at-apple-migrating-the-password-monitoring-service-from-java/ https://www.swift.org/blog/swift-at-apple-migrating-the-pass...

ofrzeta 1y ago

How is this possible? Here they say it's fast: https://www.swift.org/blog/how-swifts-server-support-powers-things-cloud/ https://www.swift.org/blog/how-swifts-server-support-powers-...

pharaohgeek 1y ago

I'm using it on my most recent projects and have had a great experience. It doesn't have the ecosystem of a language like Java, which can be frustrating, but it certainly handles 90% of my needs out of the box. I've never had a performance issue with Vapor. Compile times can be a bit slow if you have a lot of dependencies, but runtime performance has been great.