back to article IBM proves love for Swift, releases Kitura web server framework for Linux

IBM has released Kitura, an open-source web server framework written in Swift, Apple's young but popular programming language which was designed for iOS and OS X. IBM IBM's Kitura, a web server framework written in Swift IBM held a press conference at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona to update the world on its …

  1. Chika
    Trollface

    Careful, IBM. The last person to profess his admiration for Swift is begging for money these days!

  2. ThomH

    It's a nice enough language if you don't mind the memory management

    Less of a syntactic load than C++'s explicit unique/shared/weak pointers but no smarter when it comes to potential cycles (i.e. a garbage collecting language like Java is still safer), quite neatly handles optional reflection, as of 2.0 finally in the modern world on exceptions, and at least aiming towards a modern take on closures.

    A lot of the standard libraries are still a hassle though, doing nothing to hide the Objective-C bridge. All the Swift-native collections and atomics are value types; anything returned by a really-Objective-C library that doesn't bridge to one of those collections will necessarily be a reference type. Even if it would make a lot more sense as a value type. So the semantics aren't always lovely. Also it bridges directly to C and to Objective-C but not to C++ so interfacing with C++ is a hassle of manual Objective-C++ work.

    It sounds like IBM is mainly just thinking about helping the iOS/Mac developers who were likely to use Swift anyway though, so I don't suppose these considerations are relevant.

    1. Tessier-Ashpool

      Re: It's a nice enough language if you don't mind the memory management

      Some interesting notes on Swift and garbage collection here.

  3. allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

    "IBM's affection for Swift is in part an effort to attract the millions of Swift client developers to its Bluemix cloud and more important, its enterprise services."

    Hmm. Is it time to recalibrate my irony detector again?

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