swift-distributed-actors

> I wanted something more like Akka https://github.com/apple/swift-distributed-actors is more like Akka, but with better guarantees from the underlying platform because of the first-class nature of actors.

> Why should they? That isn't their target audience. Because they need it? Apple discontinued macOS server, i bet they use Linux in some of their servers All their networking related libs are available and tested for Linux [1, 2, 3] Let's not forget that they package Swift for Linux, and now also for Windows [4] Swift is a cross-platform language (you not wanting to understand it doesn't change this fact), it's not a macOS framework [1] - https://github.com/apple/swift-nio [2] - https://github.com/apple/swift-protobuf/blob/main/.github/wo... [3] - https://github.com/apple/swift-distributed-actors/search?q=l... [4] - https://forums.swift.org/t/announcing-swift-5-6-2-for-linux-...

Pretty excited for this. Looks like a good alternative to Erlang or Akka with the native performance / low resource utilization of Swift. Erlang lacks strong typing and Akka is DSL-hell. Both Erlang and Akka/JVM are GC languages whereas Swift uses atomic reference counting. Looks like they've open-sourced a transport [0] and are adding support for distributed tracing as well [1, 2], which is a huge aid for system operators and debugging. [0] https://github.com/apple/swift-distributed-actors/ [1] https://apple.github.io/swift-distributed-actors/1.0.0-beta.... [2] https://github.com/apple/swift-distributed-tracing

Apple is in the business of selling hardware, and developing a cross-platform toolkit would have the potential to cannibalize that. I think Swift's weak footing in other OSs is also owed to that fact. Apple's best bet is to create an ecosystem of hardware and software that is self-sustaining and moated. I'd argue that they have been successful in that, but all those web platforms have significantly weakened the moat. You don't need apps like Sketch anymore (infact I consider Figma way superior), and you don't need most of their bundled native apps—there are great replacements that are either 3rd party native, or web based, or hybrid apps. So how will they strengthen the moat? Probably not by sharing code with other platforms. They seem to be ready to accept that distributed systems won't go away and are obviously actively buying into that