Swift is still (and will always be) automatically reference counted. Rust lets you closer to the metal. Rust also has much stronger safety guarantees – it's pretty easy to write Swift crashers that would just never compile in Rust. That's a big deal for the kind of software Rust is pitching itself at.
They do feel like quite similar languages; I'd think of them as a complementary Systems/Applications pair.
They do feel like quite similar languages; I'd think of them as a complementary Systems/Applications pair.