Given that the person who created LLVM also created Swift, the ability to be used as a systems programming language was always there. Chris Lattner, the creato

Given that the person who created LLVM also created Swift, the ability to be used as a systems programming language was always there. Chris Lattner, the creator of both LLVM and Swift, has referred to Swift as “syntactic sugar for LLVM.” They are deeply tied together. The amount of Swift code in Apple's operating systems has increased every year. https://blog.timac.org/2023/1019-state-of-swift-and-swiftui-ios17/ https://blog.timac.org/2023/1019-state-of-swift-and-swiftui-... Lattner gave an interview looking at the advantages of reference counting over the sort of garbage collection used in languages like Java, C#, and Go while still avoiding error-prone manual memory management. > ARC has clear advantages in terms of allowing Swift to scale down to systems that can’t tolerate having a garbage collector, for example, if you want to write firmware in Swift. I think that it does provide a better programming model where programmers think just a little bit about memory. https://atp.fm/205-chris-lattner-interview-transcript#gc https://atp.fm/205-chris-lattner-interview-transcript#gc