The Engineering Leader

A Moment with Tim Condon

April 11, 2022 Steve Westgarth Season 1 Episode 13
The Engineering Leader
A Moment with Tim Condon
Show Notes Transcript

Tim Condon is a member of the Vapor, Server Side Swift core team and in this moment he discusses some of the most recent developments in the framework as well as some of the changes that are coming to vapor in the near future.

Tim Condon:

So vapour is kind of under going, kind of it's in the middle of a big change. So we're shifting from using kind of old school futures and promises to Swift new concurrency model.

Steve Westgarth:

Tim Condon is a member of the vapour server side swift core team. And in this moment, he discusses some of the most recent developments in the framework, as well as some of the changes that are coming to vapour in the near future,

Tim Condon:

we released the async await, or at least the initial async await API's, back in October when Mac OS 12 was released. And we're kind of evolving on that and seeing how that goes. So it's really nice because it means that the kind of barrier to entry for learning server side Swift is massively reduced. Because of instead of, instead of having to learn a whole new asynchronous framework and tools, you can just use Swift concurrency like you use on any other swift platform. Migrating to Swift six is going to be a big challenge that's going to really kind of take swift to the next level. So the focus on Swift six predominantly is going to be around data safety and concurrency. So in Swift, 5.5 async await was released. And that provided the current concurrency model for swift, using the async await keywords similar in the way that C sharp works. And JavaScript works, at least at a very high level, under the hood, very different. Swift, 5.6 and 5.7 have started to introduce more kind of concepts for protecting data that's read across different threads, and in different concurrent environments. So there's a thing called sendible, which is basically a way of marking your data as essentially thread safe so that it can be accessed from any asynchronous context without being worried without worrying about it, affecting something in the different threads. And those kinds of things will give you compiler errors if you try and make data accesses across different threads, which is huge. No other language no other mainstream language has a really has anything like that. And so you'll be able to your compiler will be able to tell you if you have risk conditions in your code, which is huge. And that's going to really kind of solidify the safety of Swift

Steve Westgarth:

Tim's technical expertise and knowledge of Swift and the vapour framework really is outstanding. If you are interested in learning swift on the server than the upcoming episode of the engineering leader Tim Condon on server side Swift is not to be missed. Let me tell you a secret. You also write bad code. If you disagree. You might as well switch off