I think Swift could work very well in a lambda/serverless context.
In that case, you'd be writing mostly functional Swift code with sparing use of reference types, which would mean you wouldn't hit ARC at all and you'd have static memory management similar to Rust.
That, along with Swift's expressiveness, ADT's and awesome type system in general would make it a great experience.
Kind of like the ergonomics of Python with an actual good compiler eliminating obvious mistakes like Rust.
Yeah I mean I think it's largely semantic. I think when most people talk about "swift on the server" they mean they want to write their server-side business logic in Swift, and that seems perfectly suitable in a serverless context.
In that case, you'd be writing mostly functional Swift code with sparing use of reference types, which would mean you wouldn't hit ARC at all and you'd have static memory management similar to Rust.
That, along with Swift's expressiveness, ADT's and awesome type system in general would make it a great experience.
Kind of like the ergonomics of Python with an actual good compiler eliminating obvious mistakes like Rust.