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I'd dispute that you can achieve high performance in Swift without paying a similar Rust/C++ complexity cost. You can write high-level GUI code that is relatively straightforward, but if you are about speed and memory usage, there is a lot of intricate knowledge you need about what things to do and which to avoid.

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Of course, if you want a very efficient application, you are completely right. But the thing is that with Swift you can get a Java like performance (which is pretty good) out-of-the-box even while paying the ref-counting penalty, without the Java memory penalty (it has a low memory footprint) and without having to run it all with a external VM.

Of course, if you want to catch-up with the average speed of C++ you will need some effort, but knowing that it will be pretty fast without much effort and without all the other penalties is reassuring.

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