Interesting news anyways.
Starting with Swift 3 they claim to be source-stable which is why I've dared embrace it wholeheartedly now.
I have a lot of respect for Lattner, obviously, but Swift has spent a LOT of goodwill that people were willing to spare it. Unless IBM pulls a really good thing out of their hat, I fear that swift might be in a perl6 position where they finally made a language worth a shit, but ran out of gas as they reached top speed.
I guess time will tell. I WANT swift to be awesome, but in order to make it a rational choice, I NEED swift to be stable, common, and approachable for new employees. (something scala can struggle with for some programmers)
It's really gonna bum me out when swift4 gets announced this spring (/s) and completely ruins everything, and then swift5 would of course be announced around the time swift4 becomes even remotely stable.
It's just been a disaster so far.
All the language improvements Objective-C has got since Swift was made available, were only to improve the interoperability between both languages.
Also just check the amount of WWDC talks from the past two years that still used Objective-C on their presentations.
This is why it is so important to have OS vendors sponsor new languages.
They are diversifying outside Java as their bet on enterprise languages.
J9 (their JVM) has been modularized and became the basis of Eclipse OMR, an infrastructure to implement programming languages, with existing support for PHP, Python and Ruby.
Swift is yet another card in the deck.