Vapor VS hummingbird

Do you mean from first-principles, or letting someone else do the work and use a framework? The latter has been around for years, extremely easy: https://vapor.codes

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An interesting fact for this community might be that the backend is a monolith written using Swift programming language (that one from Apple to make iPhone apps) using Vapor framework (https://vapor.codes), so I thought that I'd share it here.

I haven't used it yet, but I've heard really good things about Vapor as far as server side Swift goes...

https://vapor.codes

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// swift-tools-version: 5.8 // The swift-tools-version declares the minimum version of Swift required to build this package. import PackageDescription let package = Package( name: "MyServer", platforms: [.macOS("12.0")], products: [ // Products define the executables and libraries a package produces, and make them visible to other packages. .executable( name: "MyServer", targets: ["MyServer"]), ], dependencies: [ .package(url: "https://github.com/vapor/vapor.git", .upToNextMajor(from: "4.70.0")), // Dependencies declare other packages that this package depends on. // .package(url: /* package url */, from: "1.0.0"), ], targets: [ // Targets are the basic building blocks of a package. A target can define a module or a test suite. // Targets can depend on other targets in this package, and on products in packages this package depends on. .executableTarget( name: "MyServer", dependencies: [ .product(name: "Vapor", package: "vapor") ]), .testTarget( name: "MyServerTests", dependencies: ["MyServer"]), ] )

Otherwise there's https://github.com/vapor/vapor

The Swift/Vapor project is a relatively easy way to do it.

Opening this webpage (https://vapor.codes) cranks my CPU (5800x3d) to 100% instantly. Why?

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