
Ask HN: Will server-side Swift be succesful? - throwawaysky9
I&#x27;m curious to hear HN&#x27;s opinion on Swift on the server-side. I&#x27;m very excited about it myself (have been dabbling with Vapor, a Swift web framework).<p>I see a potential road-block for Swift&#x27;s becoming really popular as a server-side language: The default ecosystem for Swift&#x2F;Vapor development seems to be macOS + Xcode, and while an Ubuntu version is available, it 1) isn&#x27;t available for the newest Ubuntu version yet, and 2) there&#x27;s no Xcode on Ubuntu, so you&#x27;ll miss out of the things that Xcode can give you that a command-line Swift interpreter can&#x27;t. Even Vapor&#x27;s own hello world example relies on Xcode. And if you&#x27;re on Windows, your only option seems to be running an (outdated) version of Ubuntu in a virtual machine.<p>Point is, while Swift and Vapor are great, Swift may not reach its full potential unless developers are less tied to a specific OS and editor&#x2F;IDE. What do you think?<p>(Btw., when asking a question like the above, some people will say, &quot;just use the best tool for the job&quot;. This is a common opinion, but in reality the popularity of a language and framework means a huge deal when it comes to getting help, looking up answers, hiring programmers, hosting your project easily, etc.).
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elpakal
> Swift may not reach its full potential unless developers are less tied to a
> specific OS and editor/IDE

I agree if our context is in regards to Developer adoption relative to other
web languages and platforms. I don't think however that Swift's server side
ambitions right now fall there though - instead, to me, it aims to seek out
Developers already using Xcode to give them an extra tool in the toolbelt.

I also think the reason you are suggesting Xcode is needed for server side
development here is because of the Vapor framework and not Swift or the Swift
compiler.

