Future of Apache Thrift Swift language bindings

Server Development
1

Hi *,

since you read this, there's a good chance you either are using Thrift already, or are at least interested in the topic to some degree.

For several months we noticed that the CI builds for Swift are broken and there are no more Swift patches or pull requests coming for a long time. This raises the question if there is any public interest left in maintaining the Apache Thrift Swift bindings any further, or whether the Swift community maybe already switched over to alternative libraries like [1]?

Although I created this ticket [2] yesterday, I would be more than happy to close it myself as "won't fix" if there would be someone stepping up anf finally becoming maintainer (and committer) for the Swift bindings. I want to emphasize that this is by no means limited to one person, quite the opposite. To keep things alive and moving forward, having multiple maintainers for a given target language around is a great advantage in many ways.

If, however, there is no active maintainer anymore and no longer any interest within the Swift community, we may be forced to draw the conclusion and drop Swift support from the codebase. At this time, it is still just an option to be taken into consideration, not a final decision.

Feel free to contact us via the Thrift "dev" mailing list (dev AT thrift.apache.org).

Have fun,
JensG

[1] https://blog.x.com/engineering/en_us/topics/open-source/2022/introducing-twitter-apache-thrift
[2] [THRIFT-5864] Drop Swift support - ASF JIRA

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Hi Jens,
thank you for reaching out. I'm part of the Swift on Server Workgroup and the Swift team.

Part of what the SSWG does is try to maintain longlevity of projects such as these, even though we didn't "incubate" this one in our process Thrift is a great project so it's sad do see the Swift support has fallen behind like that.

A quick look seems like the issues are not that drastic, but of course I understand you'd like to find some committed maintainer rather than a one off fix here.

Please give us a while so we can check for some active users and potential maintainers which may be interested to step up here. We'll report back as soon as we can, thank you for letting us know about this.

If anyone in the community on the forums is interested please chime in as well, thank you!

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