It's a systems language, and imo way more beautiful than c++.
Taken from https://swift.org/about/
"Swift is a successor to both the C and Objective-C languages."
Taken from https://developer.apple.com/swift/
It's almost like saying javascript will replace C/C++. I want a nice language like Swift (or Go) to replace C but there is none. Rust was the best/latest failed attempt.
https://github.com/mikeash/memorydumper2
I also gave a talk on this subject a couple of years ago. It's out of date by now, but the basics are still more or less intact:
Or peruse the standard library documentation for UnsafePointer, UnsafeRawPointer, UnsafeMutablePointer, and UnsafeRawMutablePointer. These are built-in types that the compiler knows about, and code that uses them should compile down to essentially the same stuff as C pointer code would.
Of course it can, it is just a matter of OS vendors caring to push it down developers throats.
There are ways to manually manage memory if required to do so, but then you suffer the consequences of dealing with Unsafe*.
That is how systems programming languages get adopted, when OS vendors do "my way or the highway".
The whole UB idiocy is a different matter, though related because it's perpetrated by roughly the same group of people, for similar nonsensical and non-validated reasons. See my post http://blog.metaobject.com/2014/04/cc-osmartass.html
See also: http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/kps2015/proceedings/KPS_201... and Proebsting's Law.
Improvements required for the toolchain in a young language, than Apple, IBM and others will certainly improve.