Ok, I've now read through the rest of this thread and I think I understand where you're coming from, but I also think you're making my point for me.

You're using a definition of OOP where only Smalltalk-style message passing counts. By that definition, you're right: Swift is closer, because `@objc` exists. But by that definition, neither Swift nor Rust is an OOP language in any meaningful sense, and the delta between them is mass-of-the-electron tiny. Swift's message passing support is an annotation that is a compatibility shim for a 40-year-old runtime, not a design philosophy.

So when you say Swift has "better OO support"... sure, in the same way that my car has better submarine support than yours because I left the windows cracked and water could theoretically get in. Technically true! Not useful!

The Ladybird team are C++ developers evaluating languages for a browser engine. When C++ developers say "OOP" they mean classes, inheritance hierarchies, virtual methods. The DOM is a giant inheritance tree. That's the context. You can tell them they're using the word wrong, but that doesn't change what they meant, and what they meant is the only thing that matters for understanding whether the claim made sense.

And under their definition-which is also the definition used by mass, essentially every working programmer and every university curriculum for the last 30 years-Swift and Rust are actually pretty close, which was my original point. Swift has `class` with inheritance, Rust has traits and composition. Neither is Smalltalk. The claim that Swift is "strictly better" was weird no matter which definition you pick.

(Also, and I say this respectfully: characterizing C++/Java/Rust as "functional programming" because they encapsulate data with functions is... a take. I get the logic chain you're following but that is not a definition that will help anyone communicate with anyone else, which is presumably the point of definitions.)