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In the previous post I described my impressions of four Swift frameworks. More precisely, I wrote about three, and the fourth interested me, but I only got around to it now. In short — I am thrilled. It is wonderful.

First of all, the project has good documentation. Not perfect, but very good. With examples and learning materials. Everything in one place on the site — excellent.

First, the framework has a console tool that makes it very easy to create new projects, run existing ones, build them, deploy them to various services, and even create a Docker container. I think that is awesome, because whenever you start coding some project, even a test one, you immediately remember the various tools from the Node.js world and want to have something similar here.

Second, the set of libraries in the framework is excellent. There is an HTTP client, database wrappers, WebSocket support, templates; by default it offers a good project structure with everything organized into folders. Out of the box there is excellent support for JSON and data that can be converted both from JSON and into JSON. There is even a localization mechanism.

Third, I managed to make my own mini-client for CouchDB through plain HTTP requests, and it works. So far only for reading; I have not yet had time to check writing, but the fact that it all worked made me very happy.

Fourth, all requests are logged by default, roughly like in Express.js. So you set up routing and in the console you can see where requests are coming in, at least understanding what is happening. On top of that, the framework ships with a logging tool.

Fifth — my whole small test project compiled and ran on Linux without problems or crashes. It took a long time to compile, but it works, and that is great.

For memory usage it is worse than Perfect so far. Perfect started at 3.5 MB and grew to 5 MB. Vapor starts at 11 MB and grows to 14.9 MB. We will see what happens next; for now that is still twice less than Node.js.

For now I will probably stop at Vapor — in my opinion it is wonderful :)