Which he somehow dismisses but is the corresponding thing to an unsafe C array.
I'm not a big fan of Swift but this rant is rather unfounded. Sometimes you have to give up high level abstraction for performance. In Obj-C he was willing to do so by using an C array. In Swift on the other hand he insists on using the high level array implementation.
The code he is trying to port is to Swift is pure C/C++ ( www.handmadehero.org ) , so probably this solution is the easiest, apart from being the most appropriate.