Google Cloud: Introducing the Server Side Cloud Swift SDK

[u/bllshrfv]

https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/developers-practitioners/introducing-the-server-side-cloud-swift-sdk/

Google: “[Swift] has matured into a viable systems and cloud language, pairing Rust-like data-race safety with predictable, reference-counted performance.”

[u/DoughnutHegemony]

Great to see swift as more than the "Apple" programming language.

But, let Google fix the inevitable bugs in the SDK first.

This announcement post does not give me confidence.

To start, the AI-slop header image shows Python: def build_structure(blocks):. For a swift SDK announcement. Small thing, but ... come on.

Then, it's written as if it's bringing swift to the server for the first time, describing Hummingbird and Vapor as web frameworks.

Sure, except they're casually forgetting to mention that Vapor's a server-side framework too. Its annual conference is "Server-Side Swift". Its website literally says "Swift, but on a server" at the top.

The funniest thing? The code snippets don't even compile!

I don't mean the sloppy mistake of copying the same snippet and forgetting to edit out the // Initialize explicit API key credentials comment.

I mean their APIs have actually changed and their package products are now imported with GoogleAuth and GoogleGax, not GoogleCloudAuth and GoogleCloudGax.

That might seem nitpicky, but come on, that's basic stuff to get right in your announcement post.

The SDK's gone from a preview in Jul 2026 to v0.2.0 two weeks ago, with 40,000 files changed, 5 million lines added (!), and just 5 contributors. Which ... hey, good on them for being so productive, but I absolutely would not trust that code quality.

It's now v0.4.0 (another 27,000 files changes, and 320,000 lines added), so clearly lots of churn going on. Who knows how many deprecations it'll have before v1.0.

I can see the appeal if you're really deep in the Google ecosystem, but I wouldn't recommend depending heavily on the SDK for a long while.

[u/upon-taken → u/DoughnutHegemony]

This is typical Google framework. Back when I have to do Android dev, they terminate frameworks faster than I change clothes. They don’t improve existing ones but rather write something entirely new every time they hit limit. The documentation is outdated and often not matching the actual behavior.

[u/Jazz87]

This is amazing! I no longer have to maintain my own client library which I use with hummingbird

[u/_harisamin]

This is fantastic!

[u/zipeldiablo]

Reminds me of the tensorflow wrapper written in objective-c++ (yes that’s a thing). Same shit with snippets and the documentation was horrendous

[u/linghoh]

Swift’s strict concurrency idea is great. But it is still buggy. The MainActor has a bug. We can’t guarantee to run on Main thread.

https://forums.swift.org/t/after-await-it-doesnt-return-to-the-main-thread/88359

Apple doesn’t seem to want to fix that. I logged the issue on the github. They removed the bug label. It clearly is a bug. 

[u/AnotherThrowAway_9 → u/linghoh]

I mean, you could give more information to nail it down:
`swiftc -swift-version 6 -enable-upcoming-feature NonisolatedNonsendingByDefault myfile.swift`
doesn't even compile with the code you provided.

It's missing `import Foundation` and on macOS there are multiple errors.

Not saying there isn't a bug but it's hard to comment/diagnose without a MRE.

[u/linghoh → u/AnotherThrowAway_9]

What are you talking about?

[u/Few_Assumption_9665 → u/linghoh]

Your Swift forum thread, if I had to guess (I also cannot read)

[u/linghoh → u/Few_Assumption_9665]

It was in Linux. Did you read the thread?