HACKER Q&A
📣 _448

Anyone using Swift on the server-side?


For web development or otherwise.

What are the challenges and advantages?


  👤 alfonsog2 Accepted Answer ✓
For Lambda, AWS EC2, and ETL job using TabularData framework.

Highly performant, It runs within docker container. Documentation is highly available.

Challenges: Getting more people to use it and collaborate with it.

SwiftUI has become more trendy, that other frameworks don't get wide relevance.

another library which brings more interesting projects is: CoreML On-Device ML training and inference


👤 cvwright
I wrote a little service to handle some of the Matrix client-server authentication API.

The first version used Vapor before we had async/await. That was painful at times but doable.

Earlier this year I got some time to rewrite it in modern Swift with async/await. It’s a total game changer. Almost as easy as writing in Python.

Maybe even easier than Python sometimes, because with Swift you have a decent type system watching your back. If it compiles, then you’re probably most of the way there.


👤 kailanb
The team over at Swift Cloud are making it run on the edge.

https://swift.cloud/


👤 akmarinov
The team at Swift Package Index is - https://github.com/SwiftPackageIndex/SwiftPackageIndex-Serve...

They use Vapor and seem to be doing alright.


👤 incanus77
Pre-pandemic I was building a new EV charging kiosk experience on Raspberry Pi industrial hardware using Swift in Docker (actually, Balena). Build times were a little long at the time, due to the RPi CPU speed and Swift’s compiler. But there were a surprising amount of hardware drivers available for things.

Also key were these Docker images: https://github.com/wlisac/swift-on-balena


👤 rnantes
I am writing the backend of my side-project with it. Async/Await in Swift is game-changing for safety and productivity. The tooling is only getting better and you can expect greater maturity with the coming of [Swift 6](https://forums.swift.org/t/on-the-road-to-swift-6/32862) likely next year.

👤 kkirsche
I don’t work for them but Omnigroup does for Omnifocus for web, last I had read in their blog posts while they were developing it.

https://www.omnigroup.com/blog/under-the-hood-with-omnifocus...


👤 jmelloy
We use Vapor3 and the language is ok, but the deployment story (docker/k8s, for us) is a nightmare and has caused us unending drama. Things seem a little better with newer versions of vapor and swift 5.5, but our experiments don’t seem to have gotten very far, and the upgrade story is quite a lot of work.