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Appleā€™s swift-distributed-actors library is an interesting one. Itā€™s an ambitious project with great potential, but while you can adopt async/await, tasks, and other areas of Swift concurrency incrementally, building a server app on top of distributed actors is a much bigger decision, especially while the library is still in beta.

What would help tremendously with making a decision like that is an example app. There are some samples in the repository and more awaiting merging, but wouldnā€™t it be great to have something a little more substantial? Thatā€™s Jaleel Akbashevā€™s plan with his swift-chat project that he posted to the Swift Community Showcase yesterday.

Itā€™s so great to see projects like this pop up within the community, and what Jaleel is building could turn into a great demo of an end-to-end Swift app. Yes, it covers advanced concurrency through distributed actors, but it also takes advantage of hummingbird, postgres-nio, and client technologies like swift-composable-architecture and swift-dependencies.

Iā€™m curious about what technologies like distributed actors will be used for. It sits somewhere in between ā€œeverything happens on this machineā€ and something totally distributed, like two apps that communicate via HTTP APIsĀ¹. Chat apps, like the one in this repository, seem like a good fit, but Iā€™m looking forward to seeing other uses appear over time and as we see the library hit a 1.0 release.

Jaleel is looking for feedback and has been clear that this is a work in progress, so please be gentle if you head over there. I love that heā€™s putting this project out there and want to celebrate efforts like this, though, so please do check it out.


Ā¹ I found these two articles helpful in taking my knowledge on this subject from ā€œzeroā€ to ā€œdangerously uninformedā€. šŸ˜‚

Dave Verwer  

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And finally...

Well, it is in silicon valley! šŸ˜

(this installation made an appearance in the recent Apple event, too)