Swift includes an automatic type inferencing system akin to languages like ML & Haskell. This is a good thing, and a very long time coming for a non-research language. It has function closures (yippee), now that Lisp, Scheme & Javascript taught everybody that they needed them, but Swift doesn't use a real tracing garbage collector: it uses reference counts. https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/documentation/Swift/Conce... I've advocated reference counts in the past for certain selected applications, but they aren't appropriate for a "general purpose" non-applicative programming language (i.e., one that includes assignment). Every such language eventually had to do a forklift upgrade to install a real tracing garbage collector, because there are just too many memory leaks otherwise. Talk to Microsoft about C# sometime. The biggest problem with both Swift & C# is that they are proprietary. Fewer & fewer engineers want to commit their lives to working for one company, so focussing on either Swift or C# might be a career-limiting move ("CLM" in Microsoft terminology). At 06:59 PM 6/6/2014, Warren D Smith wrote: