fast.ai did this with swift in their course https://course.fast.ai/part2
The Julia language with the Flux deep learning library is another very interesting but not mainstream path to take.
Google has a fairly sizable team around it, it has a fast path to adoption by the large pool of swift devs and fast.ai, and of course, google hype.
Chris leaving doesn't seem to be an issue: https://twitter.com/clattner_llvm/status/1222032740897284097