This was actually part of something else I've been working on rather than attempt at deliberately reinventing the wheel. That said, I do think there's some benefit in rewriting existing Objective-C frameworks in Swift as Swift's interoperability with Objective-C can be difficult to deal with at times

Why is the code so verbose?

     let result = CFURLCreateStringByAddingPercentEscapes(kCFAllocatorDefault, self.bridgeToObjectiveC(), charactersToLeaveUnescaped, charactersToBeEscaped, CFStringConvertNSStringEncodingToEncoding(encoding)) as String

Almost all of Apple's frameworks written in Objective-C and C are incredibly verbose. It's just an adopted style of the language and although it's often a little difficult to look at, it can be quite helpful sometimes

Swift should be less verbose

It is actually, but functions like the one mentioned above are bindings for Objective-C / C functions and share the same name as the function they bind to

While Swift is a new language, that method is calling into very old framework code written in Objective-C. Which is very verbose.

That looks more like a C function call. If it was an Objective C message the named parameters would make it far more verbose (and readable).

Maybe they'll make even a Swift SPDY server.