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I’m with you on the prediction, but I disagree with your last point. My impression of Kotlin (as an avid swift user) is it is a modern, well-designed Java, but it’s still Java. What Swift does differently is what really sells me on it in the first place: copy on write and deterministic (for the most part) ARC.

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ARC an be a real pain with closures though. I'm often discouraged to use them in Swift, because I can't be bothered to figure out if I have all my references correctly set. GC lets you not worry about it. It comes with its own disadvantages, but does it really matter in most cases? Optimizing for productivity seems way more important then pure performance these days.

Well, the gotcha's are pretty straight forward - don't capture self. Xcode actually features runtime memory leak detection which can detect this (though I've never seen it actually work...).

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