Improvements for Swift on Server in 2023

What’s in store for the year 2023

Late in 2022, the Swift Core Team announced a reorganization that will affect Swift development going forward. These changes will directly affect Swift on Server development in a positive way. In addition to the existing Swift on Server workgroup, there is the new Language, Website and Documentation Workgroups. On top of this, the Core Team is looking into the creation of a workgroup to improve Swift’s usability across multiple platforms. This is all great news for developers using Swift. Here is a list of planned improvements that will affect Swift on Server in 2023.

Swift on Server Workgroup

The Swift on Server workgroup will continue to focus on advancing the state of Swift on Server and Linux in 2023. Their emphasis will be on increasing industry awareness and developing high-quality libraries and tools. Their primary areas of focus:

• Drive full adoption of the Swift concurrency model as the standard for user-facing APIs.
• Promote standardization of high level server side (HTTP) functionality.
• Raise awareness of how SwiftPM plugins can advance the state of server tooling.
• Increase consistency of the toolchain, libraries, and tooling across all platforms.
• Expand the server focused guides available on swift.org.
• Advance the support of Swift in popular industry tools.

Build System Integration and Improvements

The compiler teams are working on improving how the compiler interacts with the build system and any other invocations. This will allow:

• Deeper integration with the swift compiler for build systems.
• Enhanced tooling quality to help library authors ship their Swift APIs more reliably.

Website Working Group

• Improve the content on the website’s Getting Started guide.
• Continue to explore Swift-based technologies for generating the website.

Foundation Framework Rewrite

On December 14, 2022 Apple announced a complete rewrite of the Swift Foundation framework in Swift as an open source project. The Swift team has already started the work. A native Swift implementation of Foundation will remove the conversion costs between C and Swift, resulting in faster performance. Tony Parker outlined the current plan for the work they will be doing and clarified how they will go about it.

A reimplementation of Calendar in Swift is 1.5x to 18x as fast as the C one (calling from Swift in various synthetic benchmarks like creation, date calculation). — Tony Parker

The Foundation framework is the cornerstone of most macOS, iOS and server side apps. It provides a large number of abstractions, including String, Array and Dictionary, more recently Regex and many more. After the initial port of Foundation to Linux allowing server apps to use these abstractions, there have been many performance improvements but this rewrite will give the framework a clean foundation to build on.

These and many more changes can be found in the announcement as well as many changes coming to the language itself. 2023 will be a great year for Swift on Server.