There is more supporting code than what I was expecting - eg
None of which is directly usable on Silver as it stands (?) due to their cross platform strategy of jumping down to C apis.
I really like the Silver strategy of compiling directly to byte code or IL, but it’s not directly compatible with Apple’s native code.
Unfortunately all the eco system which develops around cross platform swift will be using these swift-corelibs-foundation and swift-corelibs-libdispatch libraries (because why wouldnt you?), which won’t be usable on Silver for the time being.
Will the compiler and AST be useful in making Silver closer to the standard?
The most useful part will be that once the ABI stabilizes for v3, we’ll be able to consume (i.e. link to) Apple Swift binaries, and compile to Apple Swift-style (opposed to pure Cocoa/Objective-C) binaries, if we’d like to…
For right now, yes. A decent and reusable base runtime (such as Apple’s Swift port of Foundation & Co) might also make it a lot more feasible for us to look at supporting other native platforms, such as Linux and eventually Windows — then main holdback for which really is the lack of a core class library to rely on).