Introducing the IBM Swift Sandbox

[hmottestad]

It's on Bluemix!!!

Here is my experience with Bluemix:

1. We needed to get bills to send to our accounting department. There is no way to get this out of Bluemix. We needed to contact 5 different people and send 2 different support tickets.

2. At one point we couldn't log into our accounts, the authentication server was down.

3. The docker container doesn't always get internet. Also it sure as hell is guaranteed to not have internet if you restart it.

4. If you use their SAAS databases, then some of them you can connect to from the outside world, but some you can't. And there is no way of knowing which.

5. Just because IBM makes a product available doesn't mean it works. We used NodeRED together with the IBM developed database connectors for DashDB. That connector will timeout after ~24 hours and then not throw any errors when you keep writing to it. Took 3 days to figure this out and fix it.

6. Their deploy system is nice, pity it brings down your service for 5-10 minutes even for deploys that are literally 100 lines of java code.

7. It's painfully slow to push images to their docker hub. Took 3 hours to upload an image with ubuntu and java. And our uplink is 50mbit.

[IBMContainerGuy]

Hi hmottestad!

I am one of the people working on the IBM container service that's available as part of Bluemix. I am not here in any official capacity, just as someone who wants to understand what the pain points of our customers.

Let me start by saying that I understand your pain. As every product on the market, we have issues occasionally, such as the authentication one you mentioned or the networking. However, these are only exceptions and rarely affect our users, at least as far as we are aware. Did this happen repeatedly or was it a one time occurrence?

With regards to the ticketing system, I believe you are correct. Things are not as smooth as you or I would like them to be. I will pass this on to the management chain.

For the uploading speed of images, I also believe this may be quite rare, since I cannot remember hearing complaints about it. Did this happen on separate occasions?

With that being said, please send us tickets when something is not going the way you'd expect.

Thank you for your feedback!

[what-no-tests]

Thank you for providing detail into the stench of your experience.

[parasubvert]

This might help with the deploy downtime (works on Bluemix , PWS, etc):

https://github.com/concourse/autopilot

[mynewtb]

Nice, Testsuite As A Service, I like it!

[bitdiddle]

Buy some of the stock, you'll feel better :)

[amasad]

I'm also planning on adding support for Swift to https://repl.it once I figure out how to implement a proper REPL with it.

[akanet]

We also just added Swift support over at https://coderpad.io for anyone that wants to run swift during interviews.

Amjad, I got started filing some issues against codemirror for better Swift support :) https://github.com/codemirror/CodeMirror/issues/3680

[niutech]

There has been http://swiftstub.com for a long time.

[AlphaSite]

There's already a repl?

[matrixagent]

Very cool, can't wait!

[melling]

Swift is gaining momentum fast. It has a big advantage because it's arguably the best way to write iOS apps. It'll replace Objective C as a top 5 used language.

In fact, a quick check of Tiobe shows Objective C heading down fast with Swift about to pass it on its way up:

http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....

[Apocryphon]

Looks like we're finally seeing the fruits of the Apple-IBM global partnership.

[king_magic]

This is really cool to see. Really hoping to see something similar appear for Swift on Azure or AWS. Also really hoping to see Swift web frameworks begin to appear, now that Swift is open-sourced & running on Linux.

[SeldomSoup]

Absolutely. Two days ago (before the open source announcement), I begrudgingly started learning Swift for a school project in iOS development. Now I'm itching to dive into the language.

[msoad]

How funny the server is down. This shows IBM cloud quality somehow.

http://m.imgur.com/dGNPBAr

[osipov]

really? it just worked for me http://swiftlang.ng.bluemix.net/?cm_mmc=developerWorks-_-dWd...

[fauigerzigerk]

This seems to be down. I'm getting 500 errors or a blank/blue page. I hope this wasn't supposed to be a demonstration of IBMs scalability prowess.

[osipov]

just worked for me...i ran my hello world app http://swiftlang.ng.bluemix.net/?cm_mmc=developerWorks-_-dWd...

[propogandist]

the service took off faster than expected

[Tloewald]

Same here. If only it were a brighter shade of blue!

[msoad]

Yup 503 for me

[sosedoff]

If you're looking for something similar for other programming languages too, check out https://bit.run/. It supports Ruby, JS, Go, Python, Rust, PHP and many more.

[coupdejarnac]

Would it be alright for me to embed bit.run in a Swift tutorial site I'm making? My contact info is in my profile.

[petterrasmussen]

glot.io just added swift support as well https://glot.io/new/swift

[Shivetya]

I am looking for a new language to learn, preferably more PC style platform focused, would this be a good language to learn?

[rdtsc]

What do you want to do with the language?:

Here are some choices I think are interesting as new languages:

Elixir : interpreted / scalability / concurrency / fault tolerance/ friendly community

Rust : compiled / close to C speed / memory safety / concurrency

TypeScript : compiles to Javascript but with types / runs in the browser

Elm : compiles to Javascrtipt / functional / runs in the browser

[JonathonW]

If you're writing iOS apps, Swift is the language to learn.

If you're writing server-side code for Linux/OSX, probably not quite yet. The language is nice, but it's only been available as open-source for a day now... the ecosystem you'd need to be productive in Swift isn't there yet.

(On the other hand, if you'd like to be involved in building that ecosystem, now's probably the time to jump in.)

[AndrewGarner]

Look into F#.

It's open source. Works on Linux, Mac OS X, Android, iOS, Windows, etc. It has a good ecosystem and tooling built around it already but you can also tap into the C# ecosystem, if necessary.

It compares really well to Swift: http://www.slideshare.net/ScottWlaschin/swift-vslanguagex but even without that comparison, it's worth a look on its own.

[jorgemf]

Have you tried kotlin? It is developed by jetbrains, works in the JVM and you can mix java code and kotlin code in the same project. It is still in beta but it has been developed for more years than swift and both look quite similar. Jet brains said they wanted to release the version 1.0 the the end of this year... Plus it is fully integrated in intelliJ idea

[niutech]

I would recommend learning Julia. It is an easy, fast, powerful general purpose programming language: http://julialang.org

[pjmlp]

If you plan to do native iOS and Mac OS X applications, yes.

[schnevets]

I wonder if this was announced as a reaction to Swift going open source. I could see some IBM team working on this system as a POC, and suddenly being given an urgent deadline to coincide with the license change.

Gain from the momentum and maybe turn a pet project into something bigger. I guess that's the benefit of having tens of thousands of developers...

[Someone]

Apple and IBM are fairly close nowadays. Because of that, I got the impression this and Apple's announcement are coordinated actions.

[mingodad]

I think that you are right on this, when looking at one of the examples (server.swift) it seems that people are paid by characters typed and they forget (or never heard of) the mantra DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself):

func fdSet(fd: Int32, inout set: fd_set) {

		let intOffset = Int(fd / 16)

		let bitOffset: Int = Int(fd % 16)

		let mask: Int = 1 << bitOffset

		switch intOffset {

		case 0: set.__fds_bits.0 = set.__fds_bits.0 | mask

		case 1: set.__fds_bits.1 = set.__fds_bits.1 | mask

		case 2: set.__fds_bits.2 = set.__fds_bits.2 | mask

		case 3: set.__fds_bits.3 = set.__fds_bits.3 | mask

		case 4: set.__fds_bits.4 = set.__fds_bits.4 | mask

		case 5: set.__fds_bits.5 = set.__fds_bits.5 | mask

		case 6: set.__fds_bits.6 = set.__fds_bits.6 | mask

		case 7: set.__fds_bits.7 = set.__fds_bits.7 | mask

		case 8: set.__fds_bits.8 = set.__fds_bits.8 | mask

		case 9: set.__fds_bits.9 = set.__fds_bits.9 | mask

		case 10: set.__fds_bits.10 = set.__fds_bits.10 | mask

		case 11: set.__fds_bits.11 = set.__fds_bits.11 | mask

		case 12: set.__fds_bits.12 = set.__fds_bits.12 | mask

		case 13: set.__fds_bits.13 = set.__fds_bits.13 | mask

		case 14: set.__fds_bits.14 = set.__fds_bits.14 | mask

		case 15: set.__fds_bits.15 = set.__fds_bits.15 | mask

		default: break

		}

	}

[asadlionpk]

We also added support for swift in https://codepad.remoteinterview.io/

Collaboration enabled REPL is there too (enter 'swift' in the shell).

[pat2man]

Seems a lot slower...

[jacques_chester]

There was a half-joke on Wednesday that we should do a Swift buildpack for Cloud Foundry.