swift-foundation VS NoMansCanvas

How recent were your experiences?

The server-side Swift ecosystem has matured over the past few years, with specific attention from teams at Apple.

For example, regarding JSON, there has been a rewrite of the JSON encoder/decoder that results in a 200% - 500% speed up in deserialization! You can read about the (still ongoing) improvements to Foundation at https://github.com/apple/swift-foundation

Regarding logging, Apple has been pushing the development of community around the swift-log package at https://github.com/apple/swift-log. Maybe you’ve seen this, but just wanted to share!

One last thing: the Swift VSCode extension is actually really good! Not sure when you used it last, but I’ve been using it on a regular basis and it’s been great — and is only getting better. Here’s the link to the extension if you’re curious: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=sswg.swi...

It’s true that Swift has had its various issues, but there’s a very real push by the core team and community to bring the language to new heights and places. Cross-platform support is getting better and better (check out what The Browser Company is doing with Swift on Windows) and a big source of performance bottlenecks are being addressed with the development of non-copyable and non-escaping (Rust-like move-only types)!

Sorry that’s a lot, but I just wanted to point out that there’s a lot of hope in Swift and really interesting things are happening for the project!

> The linux version of swift replicates a large number of native mac frameworks using whatever mix of C and C++ gets the job done.

Note that this is changing, on Darwin and Linux alike. Foundation.framework is transitioning from being a Swift interface over a C / Objective-C implementation to an Objective-C interface over a Swift implementation.

https://github.com/apple/swift-foundation

Something not noted in the article is that any binary which links Foundation, even if otherwise written entirely in Obj-C, now uses Swift. This is due to the Foundation Swift rewrite effort (https://github.com/apple/swift-foundation) that is rewriting Foundation is Swift while maintaining Obj-C ABI compatibility.

The github page is here. https://github.com/apple/swift-foundation

It also uses a local SQLite db instead of a separate MySQL server, which makes deployment quite trivial (git clone && make run). The web client is still built with React, I've been thinking of rebuilding it with a single .html file and minimal JavaScript.

[1] https://github.com/vkoskiv/NoMansCanvas

Earlier this year I set out to completely rewrite an old project[1] using minimal, battle-tested dependencies to avoid having to constantly patch code rot associated with more modern languages and toolchains. The rewrite[2] is now complete, more performant and lightweight than the old one, and I'm confident I won't have to touch it much, if at all, and it will compile and work in 20 years.

[1] https://github.com/vkoskiv/NoMansCanvas

[2] https://github.com/vkoskiv/nmc2