I assumed you were talking about there being a well-defined relationship between a struct definition and its layout in memory. As far as I know, Swift can allocate chunks of memory and play with bytes explicitly without resorting to assembler, so I think that's pretty much covered.
That said -- if Swift were to be used for systems programming, you'd probably want better support for all of this stuff (starting with inline assembler), and for all we know Apple is already tinkering with this stuff in-house, it just hasn't released it yet (e.g. because it's in flux).
Since it's perfectly possible to do inline assembler via a straightforward kludge, adding that particular feature to Swift would be almost trivial.
As things stand, it would be pretty easy for a third-party (once Swift is open sourced) to add the necessary niceties to the standard libraries or Swift itself, so these kind of objections are pretty minor. The big question is low-level performance, and Swift has real advantages over Python and Go here.
That said -- if Swift were to be used for systems programming, you'd probably want better support for all of this stuff (starting with inline assembler), and for all we know Apple is already tinkering with this stuff in-house, it just hasn't released it yet (e.g. because it's in flux).
Since it's perfectly possible to do inline assembler via a straightforward kludge, adding that particular feature to Swift would be almost trivial.
As things stand, it would be pretty easy for a third-party (once Swift is open sourced) to add the necessary niceties to the standard libraries or Swift itself, so these kind of objections are pretty minor. The big question is low-level performance, and Swift has real advantages over Python and Go here.