Comparing Rust and Swift: Trade-offs Between Control and Developer Convenience

Rust invented the concept of ownership as a solution memory management issues without resorting to something slower like Garbage Collection or Reference Counting.

But, when you don't need to be quite as low level, it gives you utilities such as Rc, Arc and Cow to do reference counting and 'clone-on-right' in your code.

Swift is a more convenient Rust - it gives you the safety and performance of a systems language with the convenience of a higher-level language.

The trade-off is clear: Rust gives you more control, Swift gives you more convenience.

For most applications, the convenience of Swift outweighs the extra control of Rust.