IBM has unofficially announced that they are abandoning Swift and their work within the SSWG starting 2020. Sad news, given that their stewardship of Kitura and clout in the enterprise market gave a much-needed credence boost to Swift in the server-side space.

Four years since Apple open-sourced Swift and made it run on Linux, the ecosystem still has ways to go to stand on its own as a battle-tested stack that attracts developers from other established communities. With that being said, this process has been accelerated since SSWG started a little over a year ago; they since have been doing a remarkable job with reconciling different projects and focusing on key modular components that benefit the community at large.

While this news is a bit of a setback, I firmly believe that server-side Swift’s best days are still ahead of it.