This is misleading, especially since Swift binaries do typically ship with actual reflection metadata (unless it is stripped out). The Swift ABI does keep layout information behind a pointer in certain cases, but if you squint at it funny it's basically a vtable but for data. (Actually, even more so than non-fragile ivars are in Objective-C, because I believe actual offsets are not provided, rather you get getter/setter functions…)

I don't disagree that Rust probably would not go this way, but I think that's less "this is spooky reflection" and more "Rust likes static linking and cares less about stable ABIs, plus the general attitude of 'if you're going to make an indirect call the language should make you work for it'".

Do you have a source on this? I didn't think Swift requires runtime reflection to make calling across module boundaries work - I thought `.swiftmodule` files are essentially IR code to avoid this