I think you're describing a chicken-and-egg problem, and you're overstating the extent to which a gap exists in terms of library support. Swift has a very capa

I think you're describing a chicken-and-egg problem, and you're overstating the extent to which a gap exists in terms of library support. Swift has a very capable standard library, a high-quality, officially supported networking library, and fantastic C and Python interop which can fill a lot of the gaps to the extent they exist. Even in its current state, I can imagine Swift being productive in something like server-less development, where it would offer a nice strongly typed alternative to scripting languages which currently dominate the space. Swift has a lot of intrinsic features which would make it nice to use for server-side development, and I'm sure it would find plenty of users if there were a strong success story to point to. Given the number of users, I'm not convinced the absolute number of Ruby users in 2009 was larger than the number of "swift enthusiasts" today.