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Stop! Don’t pack up your desk and welcome the weekend just yet. It’s Monday, not Friday. 😂

As you may have seen there was a hiccup with publishing last Friday’s issue where the software I use to publish it was completely broken for the day. 🙄 Thankfully it’s back now, and I can keep my promise to publish today.

13 years and 7 weeks isn’t a bad streak for publishing every Friday, though, is it! 🎉

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The big Swift news from last week happened at the Server-Side Swift conference in the keynote session. Tony Parker and Ben Cohen announced swift-java, a Swift/Java interoperability library.

I haven’t seen the presentation as I wasn’t in attendance this year, so I’m working with almost zero information rather than having the full context, but I think this is a pretty big deal for Swift.

I can hear you thinking "really?", and if you’re an iOS or macOS programmer I get it. It’s extremely unlikely that you’ll ever use this or any of the other server-side Swift libraries that Apple contributes to on a daily basis. It’s off to one side and out of the day-to-day limelight, but the Swift team (and therefore Apple) is taking server-side Swift seriously.

It’s been no secret that Apple is using Swift on the server internally for a while. We obviously don’t know exactly what they are using it for, but the effort they are putting into libraries and interoperability tells a story. Java is a big deal for interoperability when it comes to big companies. It just is.

I used to think Apple was going to do "the Apple thing" with server-side Swift and that one year we’d see a big tentpole "iCloud functions" feature or full server-side framework. Something that’s just as polished and glossy as SwiftUI. I changed my mind about that a few years ago, though. Instead, I don’t think they’re hiding anything. I think what you see with their support of server-side Swift development is the plan, and interoperability libraries like this are part of it.

This is in total speculation, of course, and I can’t wait to see the announcement presentation from the conference so I can hear it in Tony and Ben’s words. That said, I think they’d agree with me that it’s big news for Swift.

Dave Verwer  

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