As a high-level description, Swift is an ahead-of-time compiled, memory-safe, multi-paradigm programming language. Swift uses reference counting for memory management instead of garbage collection, and has recently added support for limited lifetime analysis. Finally, Swift leans heavily on types with value semantics by leveraging copy-on-write. This enables powerful local reasoning, as value types are either mutable or shared, but not both.
Famed mathematician, cryptographer and coder Daniel J. Bernstein has tried out the new type-safe C/C++ compiler, and he's given it a favorable report. The modestly titled Notes by djb on using Fil-C doesn't sound like much, and indeed, the introduction is similarly modest: I'm impressed with the level of compatibility of the new memory-safe C/C++ compiler Fil-C (filcc, fil++). Many libraries and applications that I've tried work under Fil-C without changes, and the exceptions haven't been hard to get working.
