> Out of curiosity, why has no-one done automatic reference counting on the server side before?
My guess is you fall into one of two categories:
1- You don't care a ton about efficiency because you can scale out to infinite servers that are relatively cheap and affordable. So you can run on django or rails or whatever and it's fine at "pre-IPO" scale.
2- You do care, but Java is good enough.
So you kind of have to be at Google's scale to care about creating a new server language. In Swift's case, the motivation was super constrained mobile devices, so bringing it to the server side is more of an incremental engineering cost against that massive investment.
My guess is you fall into one of two categories:
1- You don't care a ton about efficiency because you can scale out to infinite servers that are relatively cheap and affordable. So you can run on django or rails or whatever and it's fine at "pre-IPO" scale.
2- You do care, but Java is good enough.
So you kind of have to be at Google's scale to care about creating a new server language. In Swift's case, the motivation was super constrained mobile devices, so bringing it to the server side is more of an incremental engineering cost against that massive investment.