Swift can call Objective-C APIs, so if you're building Mac or iOS apps, you'll get access to the full Cocoa API. You can't build iOS apps in Scala (as far as I know) and I've never been a fan of Java GUIs.

Just compile to native code using an AOT compiler like RoboVM.

I want to get away from the JVM

Same here. I want to get away from Java and the JVM. Twenty years old and now owned by Oracle.

Mind if I ask why?

These are probably not very good reasons, however:

-It's slow

-It's annoying for testing

-It's run by Oracle

-It feels antiquated

If you want a strong resemblance, Swift looks spookily like Groovy - to the point where I have to actually check sometimes that I'm not reading Groovy code. I would say much more so than Scala.

The examples on the first page of the documentation ( https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/mac/documenta... ) are:

  let maximumNumberOfLoginAttempts = 10        // let keyword
  var currentLoginAttempt = 0                  // var keyword

  var welcomeMessage: String                   //type postfixed after colon

  if turnipsAreDelicious {                     // no parens around if-condition
    println("Mmm, tasty turnips!")
  }

  let http404Error = (404, "Not Found")          //tuple
  println("The status code is \(statusCode)")   //interpolated string uses \( ... )

I don't think the syntax looks like Groovy at all!