What is the goal of Swift?

The primary goal of the Swift programming language is to combine high-level features with the performance of lower-level languages. Swift aims to achieve C-level performance while maintaining a higher level of abstraction and ease of use, similar to Ruby. This allows for more productive and enjoyable app development, particularly for iOS platforms, without the language getting in the developer's way 1.

Chris Lattner, one of Swift’s creators, highlights that Swift was designed to be "infinitely hackable," enabling developers to modify and understand every layer of the stack, which facilitates productivity and innovation in fields like machine learning 2. Swift also focuses on memory safety and performance optimizations, addressing limitations in older languages like Objective-C that couldn't be fixed without a fundamental change 3.

Overall, Swift strives to make developers more productive by leveraging high-quality libraries, promoting progressive disclosure of complexity, and ensuring strong interoperability with legacy languages while enhancing performance 4 5.