Well, a fun fact: there is nothing funny about that list :). It should have been called "Some facts about Rust's growing popularity".

Now, my predicament: I love Rust's type system and tooling, but it's really hard to justify to myself the pain of writing correct Rust code (borrowing, lifetimes, etc.) when I know I can get almost the same effect by using a GC language + immutable messages.

And I don't need that last drop of performance either.

So if you just want a native language with a good type system and a growing ecosystem, where do you go? Still Rust or something else?

To me, Swift feels very similar to Rust only a lot simpler. Arc is also (imho) a nicer solution than a GC (though people have different opinions on that). Even better, with future versions, some of the features of Rust (i.e. lifetimes) will also come to Swift in an opt-in way. It is still a young language but fun to code in.

What's coding in Swift like outside of being on macOS? Is the tooling decent on Ubuntu / *NIX or Windows?

The "core language" pretty much works great on Ubuttnu, but there are still minor annoyances getting it installed, or building it, on Linux. Other Linux targets, also doable, but more annoying. Windows, I haven't really heard of people doing for real. Not sure that's even on anybody's radar.

What's really awesome is how far Swift has come with the core lib Foundation, which is a from-scratch clone of Apple's Objective-C and closed-source macOS/iOS Foundation library[1], written in Swift, in the open. It is not done, but huge swaths of it are now done[2], and that makes coding in Swift on Linux a lot more pleasant, since we don't typically want to waste time rolling our own regex support, Unicode string manipulations, basic geometry routines, HTTP networking, date formatting, etc. But Foundation is a huge, almost 30-year-old library that has evolved continuously and has shipped with every OS X/macOS/iOS release. An open-source Swift re-implementation of that sounded like "yeah right" bullshit/fantasy when they announced it but now it looks very real just a couple years later.

Tooling is different issue, though. Swift is a modern language with excellent support for auto-completion and in-editor hinting and help. People complain about it all the time, but Xcode is so much better than any IDE on Linux (or any other platform) for coding in Swift that I do most of my Swift-on-Linux work using a Mac, with Ubuttnu running in VMWare Fusion. If a basic editor will do, though, you have a lot of choices. For builds and package management, Swift Package Manager is now built into Swift, and works great. (It also has an option to automatically generate Xcode project files from Swift packages, which is hugely useful; my practice, and I think the prevailing or at least emerging convention, is to keep the package and source in git but treat the Xcode project as a throwaway item, not in version control, that can be generated whenever needed. So you don't need Xcode, but its easy to use for editing convenience when you want, assuming you have a Mac. But not all devs need to have Macs.)

I think you still have to like Swift a lot to choose it for your Linux project, but it is doable. I'd be surprised if Swift adoption on Linux didn't quintuple or sextuple by the end of 2018.

[1]: https://github.com/apple/swift-corelibs-foundation

[2]: https://github.com/apple/swift-corelibs-foundation/blob/mast...