Swift is a neat language, but it’s a hard sell for server-side software. The ecosystem is tiny, and there’s nothing you gain from using it instead of Go or Rust for infra / distsys.

Also, it works okay at best with VS Code, and you couldn’t pay me to use Xcode.

Kotlin tried doing similar things to gain adoption on the server side. But server-side programming is a crowded space, and people just don’t like writing distsys code in another JVM language. Swift’s story is a little better on that front.

If you want a quick-and-dirty language, Python and TypeScript do the job. For perf-sensitive, highly concurrent environments, Go is hard to compete against. A lot of ops tooling and infra code is written in Go. For systems programming and embedded code, Rust is a better choice.

So while it’s fun to think about what language X gives you in terms of syntax, in practice it’s rarely enough to pick a language like Swift for your next non-toy backend distsys work.

Also, Apple. Given their stance against free and open source software, I wouldn't be too thrilled to pick a language that works better in their walled garden.