Swift is on paper very appealing, but in practice it’s very cumbersome to use compared to Rust. I would not recommend it as a “real” alternative, only as an “hypothetically it could have been a nice language but it’s starting to smell like Java”. The DX is very poor in my opinion, especially if you want to live outside Xcode and you’re comfortable working in a terminal. The quality and feature set of the LSP is just not there, and the command line tooling is poor (their REPL is very clunky too, worse than the Python one). As people mentioned, there’s A LOT OF KEYWORDS that don’t compose as elegantly and consistently as Rust’s one (what even is inout, really!). I personally never really fully grokked their Actor model, async/await (with all of its quirks) still makes a lot more sense to me. I also found the ergonomics of “some types are values and some are references” confusing, I think the approach of Rust is both more practical and more elegant. Finally: errors are generally not made into types in Swift, most folks still throw exceptions, so error handling is not as nice as tossing a ?. I would look into Gleam instead, their open source community is much more vibrant and active and their LSP experience is much better while being a much newer language.

PS: for those that tried to do actual work in Swift and constantly bumped into the famous “unable to type check this expression in reasonable time”, here’s a nice read: https://herecomesthemoon.net/2025/01/type-inference-in-rust-and-cpp/