I'd agree with many of your concerns about Objective-C as a language for writing cloud services. The best thing about it as a language vs. more modern alternati

I'd agree with many of your concerns about Objective-C as a language for writing cloud services. The best thing about it as a language vs. more modern alternatives is that the lack of GC makes worst-case memory allocation times predictable, which is important in a client app but not so much on a server. The most interesting thing about this to me is that it makes the Apple frameworks (especially the multimedia ones --- CoreImage, CoreAudio, etc) available to cloud services. I wonder about using RubyMotion or Mono with a service like this. It might address some of your concerns about the language.