> The "normal path" of least friction in Swift is a reference-counted world, while the "normal path" in Rust is the ownership-and-borrowing world.
Of course, but the borrow checker in Rust does a lot to smooth out that potential friction; and Swift will also include comparable facilities starting from Swift 6, which will finally achieve comprehensive safety including in concurrent code.
> it's really the inevitable outcome of seamless compatibility with the COM-like model of Objective-C
There's a comparable focus in Rust of getting not-quite-seamless compatibility with the COM-like model of... well duh, COM. See Microsoft's efforts at getting low-level components rewritten in Rust into their OS's.
