[barbecue_sauce]

While I do think the choice of Swift is kind of weird, you are wrong about Swift being garbage collected (it uses Automatic Reference Counting). It also compiles to actual machine code (rather than an intermediate representation for use in a VM).

[pjmlp]

Reference counting is a garbage collection algorithm as per CS literature, you are mixing it up with tracing garbage collection algorithms.

Swift makes use of SIL and LLVM bitcode before the final binary is produced.

Likewise C# can be AOT compiled to actual machine code via NGEN, .NET Native, CoreRT and Mono/Xamarin.