DO-178C, Software Considerations in Airborne Systems and Equipment Certification is the primary document by which the certification authorities such as FAA, EASA and Transport Canada approve all commercial software-based aerospace systems.
Some of the requirements of DO178C are to have 100% code coverage through tests. With the availability of XCTest into open source domain now this can be achieved and proved to the certification authorities. This aspect can be handled by the companies developing commercial software-based aerospace systems. However there is still need to have such certification of the language compiler and the included libraries. Do you think this can be taken up in future releases?
I have more than dozen years experience in Aerospace domain. I think using Swift in the development of aerospace systems will greatly reduce development time and cost of development. Swift being the latest, modern general purpose programming language, there are many skilled engineers available than the current state of the aerospace industry. This will also give motivation for the system designers to develop innovative solutions keeping security in mind.
I am sure the case can easily be extended to other safety critical domains like automobile, and medical equipments. That is to say to all the critical systems running variant of Unix.