Paul Krill
Editor at Large

Swift language group gets behind structured concurrency

news
Aug 21, 20232 mins

Swift Server Workgroup also aims to port the popular Swift toolchain installer for Linux to macOS and Windows.

Server-side goals for the Swift language this year include promoting the adoption of structured concurrency while also emphasizing better tools, according to an August 17 bulletin from the Swift Server Workgroup (SSWG).

SSWG believes structured concurrency is a key feature that will make Swift stand out on the server. Plans include producing an adoption guide for structured concurrency that covers best practices around the Sendable, async/await, TaskGroup, and Task APIs, and applying concurrency best practices to core ecosystems such as swift-service-lifecycle.

SSWG said the Swiftly toolchain installer is growing in popularity on Linux and the group would like it to port it to Windows and MacOS. Other tool enhancements being considered include adding support for Swift Package Manager to the GitHub dependabot, investigating Canonical Chiseled Containers to see if Swift containers can be provided with a very small update and a hardened footprint, and investigating Swift Package plugins to improve deployment of Swift on the server.

Other areas of focus for SSWG for the year 2023 include:

  • Better showcases of Swift on server deployments and success stories.
  • Boosting visibility of Swift as a server language.
  • Developing a Swift-native Memcached client.
  • Creating a common connection pool library to make it easy to adopt connection pooling.
  • Creating a shared middleware implementation for use in web frameworks like Smoke, Hummingbird, and Vapor.
  • Encouraging adoption of distributing tracing to round out the observability story.

Reflecting on 2022, SSWG cited accomplishments including client libraries for Kafka, begun as a Google Summer of Code (GSoC) project, and Cassandra, pitched for incubation, as well as libraries for GraphQL and RabbitMQ. A Memcached client library was proposed as a GSoC project.

Paul Krill

Paul Krill is editor at large at InfoWorld. Paul has been covering computer technology as a news and feature reporter for more than 35 years, including 30 years at InfoWorld. He has specialized in coverage of software development tools and technologies since the 1990s, and he continues to lead InfoWorld’s news coverage of software development platforms including Java and .NET and programming languages including JavaScript, TypeScript, PHP, Python, Ruby, Rust, and Go. Long trusted as a reporter who prioritizes accuracy, integrity, and the best interests of readers, Paul is sought out by technology companies and industry organizations who want to reach InfoWorld’s audience of software developers and other information technology professionals. Paul has won a “Best Technology News Coverage” award from IDG.

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