They mention C++ quite often, it seems like they plan to become more than an Apple-first language. If Swift had been designed to be cross platform first and then had optional, but well supported and official "ObjcInterop" and "ApplePlatform" modules it could have taken a serious portion of Go and Rust's market share. But as it is nobody outside the Apple ecosystem is even considering it.
As to "Val", there is inout (and sink set) which Herb Sutter also suggested for C++ to replace all the &ref, const ref&, *ptr, and value parameter mess which to a degree Rust also inherited.
The default let parameters (const ref&) is also what Carbon defaults to. And with explicit copies there are now destructive moves as in Rust. They write "Our goals overlap substantially with that of Rust and other commendable efforts, such as Zig or Vale" - a wasted opportunity to mention "Rust" in the title here!
I just think the fun keyword is silly and the wrong width, just use fn already! But I like any language where reference and value semantics are not hidden behind compiler magic.
>But as it is nobody outside the Apple ecosystem is even considering it.
You'd be surprised. There are communities using Swift on Linux and elsewhere...
I could bet 99,9% of them are ios developers "forced" to make a website for the app