It's a wonderful language, it's general purpose, it's cross platform, and it's open source (Apache license). I wish it was a mainstream language outside the of the Apple universe.
What I love the most is it's so flexible. It's a full featured OOP language, a full featured Procedural language, a full featured Functional language, a full featured declarative language, and you can relatively easily make it work with anything else you can think of.
It also has the best concurrency system I've ever seen - and with high performance computing relying so much on parallel computing these days that's a must and often what I miss the most in other languages.
A lot of other languages do some things just as well as Swift, but Swift does everything really well.
Completely agree. Unfortunately Apple will need to start treating Swift on non-Apple platforms as a first class citizen for it to achieve any sort of wider popular use.
When Lattner left, it was a signal that they were unlikely to ever move in that direction. Since then, I'd say they've moved further away if anything. They certainly made a hell of mess introducing SwiftUI and Combine (though glad to say things have recovered significantly since then).