Sun, 5 Jan 2020 14:09:00 +0000

Cui dono lepidum novum libellum?

It's been a few years since I last posted anything substantive on the internet, mainly due to my development preferences. So what better way to re-acquaint myself with the web than by writing my entire blog in Swift?!

Note: This post is not intended to be an in depth technical one with benchmarked data backing the opinions expressed. This is more of an opinionated opener to a series of posts to come.

TLDR; My goal for the next coming years is to see how far I can take Swift as a general purpose first class language outside of Apple's development ecosystem.

Why Swift?

As of this post, the internet is still heavily dominated by Javascript and many other popular web frameworks written in anything from Ruby to Go. Even Rust is trying its hand at world domination.

I've decided to take the road less traveled despite there being so many other more efficient and readily available tools out there because I both love and believe in Swift.

Realistically speaking, I could have definitely gotten away with using any number of the more mature technologies out there. I've always found myself switching between languages depending on what needed to get done. I've always thought of Python as the 'getting stuff done' language to automate tasks or prototype extensive programs in a script or 2. Anything more I've always found myself utilizing something more robust such as Java or C++ / C#.

On the other hand, Swift is versatile and the developer experience is phenominal. It's an elegant language by design. It like a programatic memoir that encompasses the values you see force fed upon us by apple's products and HIG. It can be as concise or verbose as you need it to be without feeling 'awkward'

And last but not least, Swift leverages the benefits of LLVM. Theoretically, theres nothing stopping universal portability among all the platforms LLVM supports

Goal

Swift has been primarily used for iOS / MacOS development but over the last few years I've seen the community grow quickly after Apple open sourced the language.

I've seen 1 guy spear head swift's development on the Windows platform, and have seen it become an integral part in machine learning work through its TensorFlow branch.

By using Swift for other tasks outside of apple app development, I hope to not only support its growing community but to also contribute to it directly.

Hopefully by the time this new decade is over, Swift will have become a first class language for anything outside of pure iOS development instead of fading into obscurity or being locked into apple's ecosystem forever. Only time and community involvement will tell whether or not the former becomes the case.