Apple’s Swift is shaping up to be potentially one of the best languages for writing server-side apps.
It seems Apple is really pushing the language in ways that make it more accessible to more developers. Writing a “Hello World” in Swift shouldn’t be so different an experience from using Golang or C#. You just use VSCode on whatever platform you’re using, and run your program from the commandline. It’s all becoming too familiar.
But they’re not only working on developer tooling. They’re heavily investing in the library ecosystem, with core functions like observability and OpenAPI generators being maintained by Apple themselves.
Swift just feels like a modern language. It has a standard package manager that uses Git for versioning (similar to Go). It has compile-time macros, and very expressive types, control flow, and concurrency primitives. It’s also praised for having C-like performance, but without the low-level toil as with Rust.
Honestly, I was surprised when I realized how mature the backend ecosystem is. I actually hope Swift ends up in the mainstream instead of Go and Rust. It’s much better balanced for productivity, safety, and efficiency.
Watch the WWDC 24 session.