Does Swift have a large community beyond iOS apps? Last I used it was years ago, right after it was introduced by Apple. I'm curious if it has found growth in other areas.
[1]: https://vapor.codes
In terms of "level of abstraction" vs "Speed", Swift is definitely at a Pareto-Optimum (if that's the term for "can't get better in one dimension without losing something in the other).
Microbenchmarks aren't the be-all yada yada yada... And it's somewhat ironic that the server framework is named Vapor. But for web apps that are computation-heavy, I think it would be a valuable option to have.
I drop in on the Vapor Slack group occasionally. I heard someone mention that version 3.0 was passing Go in benchmarks. Apparently they had some performance regressions integrating nio (it was just released last month) - not sure what the status is now.
The API's not stable, the framework is in very active development.
I imagine things will settle down in a year or two - until then, there are so many great alternatives (other languages), that I don't see Swift gaining much ground.
And if your making a backend, why not use kotlin which is fairly similar, but you get the entire java ecosystem?