The First Beta of Vapor 5 Is Out

A few days ago, the first beta for Vapor 5 was announced. If you don’t know what Vapor is, it’s probably the most popular web framework for Swift. I’ve posted about it before.

Vapor 5 is the first new major version in six and a half years and promises a lot of new features, particularly when it comes to concurrency and other performance enhancements.

This is the list of highlights from their announcement blog post:

• No more EventLoop or EventLoopFuture! Vapor 5 is fully async/await with real structured concurrency support. We’ve even managed to almost completely remove NIO from the public APIs, with a couple of ByteBuffers to remove from Multipart and some NIO work around compression and TLS to figure out.
• A brand new HTTP server. Vapor 5 builds upon Swift HTTP Server, which is a new, modern HTTP server with support for bidirectional streaming, HTTP/3, and much more. Vapor can now concentrate on being a great web framework and hand off the HTTP handling to the new server.
• Streaming by default. Vapor 5 request and response bodies are now streaming-first, making it super easy to work with large files, backpressure, with great memory efficiency. We still have lots of syntactic sugar on top, so if you’re dealing with Data or JSON, you can easily handle those. Even better, the streaming closures use Span, making it as performant as possible.
• Service Lifecycle support. Vapor 5’s Application is just a Service, making it super easy to integrate with bigger applications. We also allow you to pass other services to your Application and let Vapor handle the lifecycle of those services as well.
• Swift Configuration support. We now use Swift Configuration to manage configuration of Vapor, making it easier to integrate with the rest of the Swift ecosystem.
• Swift HTTP Types. Our request and response types now expose HTTPTypes such as Status to better integrate with the ecosystem and make the HTTP server (and NIO) an implementation detail.
• A brand new, rewritten, Vapor Testing library that unifies the API with one way to test your application.
• Streaming support in the Client and VaporTesting.
• All of the SwiftPM flags! We have enabled almost every flag we could, including InternalImportsByDefault, NonisolatedNonsendingByDefault and .strictMemorySafety(). Not only does this ensure we are as safe as possible, but it sets us up for the future to handle Swift versions.
• New traits that make it easy to turn off certain features to shrink down the amount of Vapor you need to compile, use and distribute.
• A new, experimental macro library. We’ve built a new experimental macro library to help you define your routes and controllers. This brings type-safe routing and parameters, compiler checked authentication, and simpler route definitions! This will be a separate post and is still moving quickly.

Vapor Blog

While I don’t have any active projects using Vapor, I’ve experimented with version 4 quite a bit and thoroughly enjoyed it. I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on version 5 and am excited for the stable release.

See the official blog post announcing version 5 for more details about it.