SSWG 2023 Annual Update

Once a year, the Swift Server workgroup (SSWG) reflects on recent community accomplishments and lays out focus areas for the year ahead. Since our last update, the Swift on server ecosystem has welcomed new projects, seen significant progress in the adoption of structured concurrency, improved its tooling, and more.

→ swift.org/blog/sswg-update-2023/

The Swift Server Workgroup (SSWG) has released its 2023 annual update, reflecting on community progress and outlining priorities for the year.

In 2022, the ecosystem grew with new libraries for Kafka, Cassandra, GraphQL, RabbitMQ, and Memcached, while three packages entered incubation: GraphQL and Graphiti, Distributed Actors Cluster, and Swift Cassandra client. Adoption of Swift Concurrency advanced, with all incubated libraries adding async/await APIs and Sendable support, and new projects using it exclusively.

Tooling improved with the Swift Extension for VS Code reaching version 1.0, Swift Package plugins in libraries like SwiftProtobuf, and Swiftly for toolchain management. Build times saw gains from compiler optimizations and Swift Crypto Extras, reducing BoringSSL dependencies. Adoption efforts included migrating guides to swift.org, Swift Package Index documentation, a community survey, and more conference talks on production use.

For 2023, the SSWG targets ecosystem growth with a Swift-native Memcached client, common connection pool, shared middleware, distributed tracing, and better showcases. Structured concurrency adoption continues with a best practices guide and application to core libraries.

Documentation will expand guides on security and deployment, aided by Swift.org redesign. Tooling aims to port Swiftly to Windows and macOS, add SwiftPM support to Dependabot, explore Chiseled Containers, and enhance deployment via plugins.