Today, the annual report of the Swift Server Work Group (SSWG) became available. This group was established a year ago to investigate and prioritize the needs of developers working on server solutions using Swift.
The group follows a so-called incubation process for accepting new modules into the language. Developers present ideas, and in collaboration with the community and SSWG, refine them for acceptance into the Swift server package index. Nine proposals have completed the full incubation process and have been added to the index.
Libraries
SwiftNIO — a non-blocking, event-driven framework for network interactions, the core of server-side Swift.
Additionally: logging API, clients for HTTP, HTTP/2, PostgreSQL, Redis, Prometheus, metrics API, and an implementation of the statsd protocol.
Swift & Linux tooling
Besides libraries, the group has also been focused on developing Swift itself and tools for Linux:
Official images with Swift 3, 4, and 5 are available on Docker Hub. Both minimal and extended images are supported.
A module for printing backtraces on Linux (based on libbacktrace). The possibility of merging it with the standard library of Swift is being considered.
Starting from version Swift 4.2.2, monthly bug-fix patches for Linux are being released.
Plans for 2020
Implementation of a greater number of libraries for working with databases, such as MongoDB, MySQL, SQLite, Zookeeper, Cassandra, and Kafka.
Distributed tracing — the third pillar of Observability (logs and metrics are already prepared).
Connection pools.
OpenAPI.
Support for more Linux distributions (currently, only Ubuntu is supported).
Writing deployment guides.
Demonstrating the capabilities of Swift Server. Currently, some companies are already using it, and feedback is planned to be collected and shared with the community.
SSWG is open to collaborating with independent developers who are interested in implementing basic libraries and capabilities for the Swift server platform.
The author of the news believes: the easiest way to become involved in development, and possibly learn a new language, is through libraries for databases (unfortunately logging is already ready).
Swift was announced in 2014 as a replacement for Objective-C for developing MacOS and iOS applications. However, it is a general-purpose language, and the Server Swift project is an attempt to showcase its capabilities as a backend language.
Source: linux.org.ru
