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.
- After evolving from an Apple-made, client-side language and years of false starts, Swift could finally make it on the server.
- 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.
- 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.
software
Google hearts Apple's Swift so much it's pumping out server-side support
After a decade of false starts, Swift is showing backend appeal
Thomas Claburn
Thomas
Claburn
AI AND SOFTWARE REPORTER
Published
fri 2 Oct 2026 // 20:52 UTC
Make us preferred on Google
AI company moves to defend critical infrastructure and open-source projects from AI
2 minutes ago
There can be only one: Google Cloud casts Gemini as your enterprise AI hero
3 hours ago
Rust upstart reveals 'reimplementation' of Microsoft Office – with Claude on coding duty
10 hours ago
OpenAI dots inspire open source imitators amid technical difficulties
1 day ago
AWS launches open-source AI agent sandbox to prevent YOLO mode disasters
1 day ago
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."
REG AD
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.
REG AD
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.
REG AD
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. ®
software
google cloud
swift
open source
cloud
Make us preferred on Google
Sources
Related stories
Pinecone BYOC: Trusted AI Knowledge in the Customer Cloud - Pinecone
Pinecone BYOC: Trusted AI Knowledge in the Customer Cloud Today, we are announcing the general availability of Pinecone Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) on AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure, bringing Pinecone’s trusted AI knowledge platform to where enterprise data needs to live. AI.
Gemini 4 Argon: our next era of frontier intelligence
Gemini 4 Argon delivers frontier performance in complex workflows across real-world software engineering, enterprise knowledge work like legal and finance, and cybersecurity defense. SVP, Google DeepMind and Chief AI Architect, Google Google’s new Gemini 4 Argon model brings.
Gemini 3.8 text-to-speech says hello
Gemini 3.8 Flash TTS and Gemini 3.8 Flash-Lite TTS are our most expressive audio generation models yet. Generate custom character voices and direct scene dialogue across Google AI Studio, Gemini API, Gemini Enterprise, Gemini Notebook, and Google Vids.
LWiAI Podcast #256 - Fable 5.1, Astra Tease, Gemini 3.8 Flash
BY ODSC AIODSC AI West 2026 runs October 27–29 in San Francisco and virtually, with 300+ sessions covering agentic AI for enterprise, personal AI and workflow automation, physical AI and robotics, generative AI, and more! Join thousands of data scientists, ML engineers.
Vulnerabilities in AI Agents Expose Trust Gap Flaw
Google and other organizations have acknowledged vulnerabilities in their AI agents, which exploit trust gaps in the Model Context Protocol.
Google's new Gemini tiers cut free users to its weakest model and lock $5/month subscribers out of Pro
Google's new Gemini tiers cut free users to its weakest model and lock $5/month subscribers out of Pro Starting in October 2026, Google will restrict access to its Gemini models for personal account users.
OpenAI’s Dot agent is enterprise software that can also order your dinner
AI Tech OpenAI OpenAI’s Dot agent is enterprise software that can also order your dinner Think of Dots as Codex, but for regular people. by Allison Johnson Oct 2, 2026, 6:00 PM UTC Link Gift New helpful little guy just dropped. Photo: Allison Johnson / The Verge AI Tech OpenAI.
Build Applications on NVIDIA BlueField Faster with NVIDIA DOCA Agent Skills
NVIDIA Technical Blog Build Applications on NVIDIA BlueField Faster with NVIDIA DOCA Agent Skills By Claudia Martinez , Matan Raz and Tamir Tevet NVIDIA DOCA AI agent skills provide verified API signatures, hardware capability requirements, and build constraints so agents can.