Yes, I am. The concentration of power between facebook and google for ML frameworks is worrying enough, but to their credit, they have so far been very open and collaborative and are giving a lot back to the ML community in terms of research
Apple on the other hand is the dictionary definition of walled garden. Their controlling and insular nature has been the reason for their success, and power to them, but for something as fast moving and community driven as machine learning, I would be very wary if relying on them for any part of it.
What possible future are you trying to ward off here? Swift is an open-source project, it's self-evidently in Apple's interest for as many people as possible to use it.
Be concrete, please. What scares you about using an open-source language which is mostly developed by Apple? Do you have the same paranoia about clang? If not, why not, what's the difference?
For me the lesson is that just because a new technology/language is out doesn't mean you should jump on it. Things need time to mature, and if you're Uber, you can't risk having half of your income rely on something new. Compilers, linkers, and programming languages (and databases and OS kernels) take years to mature. Hell, just earlier this week was a post about diagnosing a 21 year old bug in the Linux networking stack for rsync of all things.
I'm quite shocked that enough experienced people felt that level of confidence. In earlier versions of Swift I personally experience slow compiles and that was on a not terribly large code base -- no where near Uber. That alone should have been a big clue of the state of things.
Are you nervous about a language that is designed and supported by the largest and most successful company in the world?
> very niche market of 100% native mobile development
That "niche" is at least 1.5 billion devices. Devices bought by the 1.5 billion richest people in the world because they like them, not because their employers forced them to. Seems like a pretty ideal "niche".
But I wouldn't agree that "swift never worked server side". I've built several backends in Vapor and it's amazing.