I'm not sure why you're saying Swift is locked in to Apple platforms, it's definitely cross-platform. It's no problem to run Swift on Linux or Windows. Of course, Apple's UI libraries aren't cross-platform. And they're putting a bunch of effort into making it better for servers and such. I wish more people realized how usable it is cross-platform, I think this is a misconception that hampers Swift adoption.

Swift is definitely my favorite programming language from a language standpoint. I really like the way Swift works. It's safe, concise without being terse, and easy to extend.

Sure, some people can argue there's some "bloat", but I think that's inevitable in a language that was designed to immediately be usable within Apple's existing APIs and frameworks. There's going to be complexity with Objective-C interop, C++ interop, etc. But that stuff is necessary for Swift to be usable for big projects. And I think Apple has done quite a good job of evolving Swift to be cleaner, clearer, more ergonomic, etc.

I'm very excited that there's a lot of effort behind an open-source, cross-platform type-safe, compiled language that also prioritizes ergonomic high-level programming.