Apple just did not care enough about server development to invest in it. There are plenty of languages and frameworks out there. I wouldn't say Go and Rust are

Apple just did not care enough about server development to invest in it. There are plenty of languages and frameworks out there. I wouldn't say Go and Rust are particularly logical choices for web development though. Of course they are being used for that but it's not necessarily the best fit. Rust is kind of restrictive and requires some serious skills to be effective in. And with Rust developers being in high demand, you end up paying a premium for them. So, if you need a simple backend, you might want to pick something more accessible. Go is of course very popular for all sorts of server stuff but you mostly find it lower in the stack in all sorts of middle ware. They both are a bit low level for web development. People seem to gravitate to more flexible/richer languages here. Which is why Java and Javascript are very popular and why e.g. Python, Php, and other scripting languages are still widely used for web development. On the native front you have things like Elixir, and a few others gaining traction. Swift being similar to Kotlin, which is popular for server stuff, could have stepped up easily. But it didn't happen. Mostly that's because Apple tightly controls its roadmap and just wasn't interested in it. Interestingly, Kotlin now has an IOS compiler and a native compiler for Linux. And there are some Kotlin server side frameworks that work on kotlin native (e.g. ktor). However, it's not a great option for native server development yet mostly for the same reasons Swift is not ideal either: library support is a bit lacking and server/linux support just isn't a huge priority in either community. So, you get compiler bugs, lack of features, performance issues, etc. On the JVM it's a different story. There Kotlin is a drop in replacement for Java in pretty much any Java framework (you can name) and there are a few kotlin specific ones as well. IMHO, it's a great fit with Spring Boot which comes with lots of Kotlin support. I've been using it for years for this and can highly recommend it. I'm interested in switching to Kotlin native for server stuff but right now it seems like I'd be a very early adopter. Swift is very much in the same boat. You can make it work probably but you'd be on your own.