Shameless plug that is directly related to the question: if you want a fairly detailed look at the two side by side, I've been comparing them as I work through

Shameless plug that is directly related to the question: if you want a fairly detailed look at the two side by side, I've been comparing them as I work through learning both over the last 10 months. http://www.chriskrycho.com/rust-and-swift.html http://www.chriskrycho.com/rust-and-swift.html I think, because of the automatic reference counting, that your overall sense is roughly right—Swift is a little higher-level than Rust—but their overall ability to write many kinds of applications will be similar (Apple platform applications being the big exceptions for obvious reasons).