Warren Moore

The problem is that any solid language should give 'me' full control if I need it. I want this mem allocated here and released there and I want it exactly like I said. Any compiler that can't do this or use 'tricks' can go to trash when trying to make highly optimised code.

Right. The less control you have over allocation and the less idiomatically you can write data-oriented code, the more of a pain a language becomes. Conversely, most people writing apps don't care about the cost of per-object heap allocation; they just want the convenience of OOP

Is Swift using ARC for memory management or a "proper" GC? I found ARC surprisingly expensive with Obj-C, and the required hand-holding to get the ARC overhead down to an acceptable level is IMHO more hairy than the old manual memory management...

“Never” is a strong claim. There’s a lot of details that are handwavy, but it’s not at all impossible. It is mostly a question of priorities (so 5 years may be too soon).

I wish there were an emoji to capture the notion of someone kicking a can as far as physically possible.

It took C 46 years to get where it is today. I expect Swift will be a better systems language 10 years from now. By comparison, that’s fast!

I do sincerely hope you’re right. More than anything, I’m curious to see incremental steps in that direction, both because they’ll be interesting and because the road is long.