Yeah, the point I was trying to make is just that Apple could easily decide to ditch Objective-C in the relatively near future. From our point of view as devel

Yeah, the point I was trying to make is just that Apple could easily decide to ditch Objective-C in the relatively near future. From our point of view as developers, there are good reasons not to, like maintaining backwards compatibility and keeping developers happy, but Apple generally seems to ignore those issues. Not that they actually want developers to be unhappy, they just expect and require them to fall in line. (Or they could ditch Swift too and go with something entirely new and crazy, but that seems too unlikely even for me) Edit to clarify: I think what they do care about is technical issues, and giving themselves the tools to make the slick products they want to make. And their technical strategy is generally pretty sound -- look at their balanced CPU+GPU designs on iOS, for example, both faster and more power-efficient than the ludicrous octo-cores and oversized screens you get on "flagship" Android devices. To me, making Swift and Objective-C interoperable was a smart decision to give themselves (and coincidentally their developers) a smooth migration path. They also think that reference-counting is better than tracing GC for the types of applications they care about (and I think they're correct). But nothing in that says they care about keeping Objective-C around indefinitely.