The current state of Swift for Server and Linux

[Zollerboy1 (Josef Zoller)]

@liuliu

1. Foundation libraries are simply not ergonomic. Comparing basic things you can do with more productive languages, it is more lines of code to do with Foundation libraries: date conversion / moving forward / backward in date, read and write files, launch a new process, parsing data with regular expression. The APIs have too much Objective-C baggage. While I appreciate the thoroughness of these APIs (Calendar / Date is really thorough!), simple uses are just not ergonomic with too much dances between objects.

I completely agree with you about the hassle that Foundation is. I mostly try to avoid it and really feel that there is too much Objective-C ballast there.

But, thankfully, there are many people actively working on these problems. Take a look e.g. at this and this pitch. These two are focused on two of the main pain points of current Swift where we still have to rely on Foundation today and they seem to gain quite much traction and positive feedback so I hope that they will probably accepted and implemented soon(ish).
IMHO we probably need similar solutions for the other problems like file I/O, etc., but all of these pitches require a lot of time to write and implement and people are doing it in their free time so it isn’t really the fastest process. But you can clearly see that Swift is making some good progress.