Google hearts Apple's Swift so much it's pumping out server-side support

After evolving from an Apple-made, client-side language and years of false starts, Swift could finally make it on the server. Google has taken note and has just rolled out Google Cloud API Client Libraries for Swift, evidently convinced Swift has a backend role thanks to its performance and ease of use. The GCP Swift libraries target Swift 6.2+ and take advantage of SwiftNIO's asynchronous event loops, HTTP/2 multiplexing, gRPC transport, and data race safety compiler flags. "For years, Swift was perceived mainly as a UI language tied to Apple client devices," said Karl Weinmeister, director of developer relations, and Carlos O'Ryan, software engineer, in a blog post. "With Swift 6 and strict concurrency checking, it has matured into a viable systems and cloud language, pairing Rust-like data-race safety with predictable, reference-counted performance." Weinmeister and O'Ryan argue that Swift manages to be both developer-friendly and suitable for low-level control over resources, which tends not to be the case for challenging systems languages like C++ or Rust. They voice appreciation for the language's lightweight runtime and Automatic Reference Counting (ARC), alongside its expressive syntax. And they approve of Swift's compile-time concurrency checking. "Data races are caught in your editor before a binary ever compiles or reaches production," they note. The Googlers argue that the Server Side Cloud Swift SDK is well-suited for servers, containers, and DevOps environments, pointing to its utility for building capable microservices using Swift web frameworks like Hummingbird or Vapor. "With google-cloud-swift, server-side Swift developers can write end-to-end cloud infrastructure with compile-time race safety, native async/await ergonomic APIs, and zero OS thread congestion," they declare. It's been quite a journey. Apple open-sourced the Swift programming language all the way back in 2015 and in the years that followed, developers started looking at Swift on the server. IBM in 2016 made Swift available on its Bluemix cloud and a few months later the Swift team announced a server API working group. The first server-side Swift conference was announced in late 2017. And Apple's work on the async SwiftNIO framework in 2018 advanced the case for backend Swift. Swift's popularity peaked in January 2020, according to the TIOBE index, when it ranked as the 9th most popular programming language. It currently ranks 18th. Stack Overflow's 2025 developer survey has Swift ranked 20th. Even so, server-side adoption of Swift has been slow. IBM reversed course in 2019, backing away from its Swift commitment. And Amazon hasn't really done much with its Smoke Framework for server-side Swift in the past few years. Still, the Swift community has kept at it. The Swift Server Workgroup launched in 2018 and, by 2024, the release of Swift 6 with data race safety checks made the language more interesting for backend applications. Swift may be more approachable than languages like Rust or C++, but it's unclear how much that will matter in the years to come as developers become more and more dependent on AI coding agents. Certainly, Swift code is readable, a benefit for those maintaining applications, but language ergonomics and approachability matter less when AI is reading and writing most of the code. (R)