Swift seems to be evolving towards something which lives between Rust and Python.

I'd say more like something between Rust and Scala, or Rust and Java. That's not a bad thing. I really like Swift.

Me too. I think "higher level rust" is a very good and useful niche. Sometimes convenience is more important than performance.

What rust features does it have?

To name a few: generics, pattern matching, memory safety by default (though not concurrent yet), no untyped-nil, the capability for C-like performance, deterministic memory management. Protocols are pretty similar to traits as well.

Though the way all of those work is substantially different. Swift doesn't monomorphize generics like Rust does[0], for example.

Swift doesn't have a concurrency story yet, so it is possible to have data races if you share data between threads. An ownership system[1] is in the works, but it is not complete yet.

[0]https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/7gkiie/implementing_s... [1]https://github.com/apple/swift/blob/master/docs/OwnershipMan...

Good summary. Also algebraic data types, although that typically accompanies the pattern matching you mentioned.

Protocols are fairly close to traits, and I much prefer that approach (and Scala's traits), to traditional OOP.

> Swift doesn't monomorphize generics like Rust does[0], for example.

Swift can monomorphize generics, but it doesn't do so by default. Normally this is left up to the compiler, but it's possible to force monomorphization using inlining attributes.