I've used Swift for iOS development and generally like it. There's no technical reason why it couldn't be great for server-side development but there are two ma

I've used Swift for iOS development and generally like it. There's no technical reason why it couldn't be great for server-side development but there are two major reasons I wouldn't expect it. First, there's no painful gap to drive adoption. Go and bit by bit Rust are both reasonable statically typed, compiled languages with good ergonomics and performance. Second, there isn't a strong community of corporate and individual developers supporting use outside of iOS. That means few people, but also little tooling. I was excited by the extensibility and some of the stuff the TensorFlow team was doing but there just doesn't seem to be enough reason to pick Swift over one of the more mature alternatives. Even on Apple's own platforms there's only full support for the latest macOS release. I'm guessing the calculation is that iOS is a big enough carrot to keep a community of Swift developers around and Apple doesn't see growing beyond that as a priority. Fair enough.