[swift-dev] Getting an immediate edit-compile-debug cycle for Server Side Swift

[Simon Pilkington]

Hi all,

One of the features web developers really appreciate about scripting (interpreted) languages such as Javascript/Node for server side development is that they provide a virtually immediate edit-compile-debug cycle. A dev makes a change to their code, refreshes their browser and see the effects of their change without a manual recompile or restarting their server. The downside is that in production you also get the overhead of an interpreted language and its environment. This has limited the practicality of using scripting languages on the server at scale despite the fact that web devs really like using them.

Considering that Swift can effectively be used as an interpreted language with the REPL I was wondering if anyone on the Server Side Swift side looked at this to create a server that can interpret code (for example to generate the response body) on the fly during development but provide the performance benefits of natively compiled code in production.

Cheers,
Simon