I long dreamed of using Objective C to build server apps. The compiler support has been there for years (GCC, later Clang), but there's no standard library. All the stuff you would want from Foundation is missing; strings, sockets, file I/O, encoding support, threads, etc., it turns out you'd have to reimplement a lot from scratch. There's GNUstep, but last I looked it, it was stagnant, and also very much geared towards GUI apps.

Swift on the backend would be even better, I think. Between all the languages that have evolved lately (including Go and Rust), Swift has struck me as the one that feels the most like my ideal language.

The Étoile OS folks have been working on top of GNUStep for a while: http://etoileos.com/

Here's a recent thing that came out of that group, which I'm interested to see in a server-side project: http://coreobject.org/

The best Web development framework of all time was WebObjects, which started at NeXT. It was basically Cocoa for the web. It was wonderful. When Apple bought NeXT they continued it for awhile and ported it to Java to try and make it more cross platform. That didn't really take, as it was a commercial product and despite lowering the price dramatically many times and loosening the licensing restrictions this was the point at which open source solutions like Ruby on Rails, despite being terrible in comparison really started to take off because they were free.

There was a great community around WebObjects and it's a shame that Apple didn't open source it in a timely fashion-- they could have changed things quite a bit.

It is still used in heavy production- for instance the iTunes store is a WebObjects Application as is, I believe, the App Store.

At the time Sun was working together with NeXT for having Objective-C in Solaris (before Oak became Java) and got their base ideas for J2EE from WebObjects.

Agree. Feels like a reasonable language to get things done and still readable. Much cleaner in design than Go, and let's not even discuss JS.

It's exactly because of server support. I'd LOVE to write obj-c on the backend - libgcd and the dispatch syntax alone makes it worthy, not to mention ARC, the ability to write pure C inline (not in an unsafe block or the like).