swift-foundation VS hummingbird

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

Such a shame. Swift has many beautiful language features.

I give swift a try every once in a while.

Problems of my last attempt:

- The Swift REPL (lldb to be precise) depends on libpython-dev (v3.8). WSL (ubuntu 22.04) comes with 2.7 and 3.10, so the lldb dependency depends on an old python version. The fix was to copy the 3.10 binary to the directory where lldb expects it, and rename it to libpython3.8.so. It seems that it's backwards compatible so it worked on my machine.

- I tried to compile and statically link a hummingbird (web framework, more light weight than vapot, https://github.com/hummingbird-project/hummingbird) hello-world example. I had a liking error. Luckilly someone in the swift forums helped me. The problem was that my package.swift file had the "-static-stdlib" flag only as a swiftSettings. It needed to be also a linkerSetting.

In the end I was able to build my example. But at this point I already spent multiple days debugging problems that are unrelated to my applicationn or the Swift language.

It's a shame because I see its potential. Fixing the (linux/windows) tooling problems would probably only take "some" developers. Apple has near infinite money and could sponsor them if they wanted to., but they gain little by it. Besides them, not many are invested in it.

Also look at: Hummingbird https://github.com/hummingbird-project/hummingbird Smoke https://github.com/amzn/smoke-framework Swift NIO https://github.com/apple/swift-nio

Hummingbird is probably the fastest/lightest backend. You can switch to it after mastering Vapor's Fluent ORM.

I'm using Hummingbird hooked up to MongoDB with Vapor Fluent. I declared input/output structs that I share to the client code via a library. All my core business logic sits on the server. I can cache the structs client side on sqlite.

If you don't need all the features of vapor, you can just use Fluent's ORM and Hummingbird. The documentation and code examples are more up to date.

Another Devil's Advocate: Why would I choose it over Hummingbird? https://github.com/hummingbird-project/hummingbird