I do also believe it wasn't ever technically "statically linked", but the dynamic libraries were separately distributed as part of every app (and so I'd think the semantic slippage acceptable given the context). This has tons of advantages, but prevented Swift from being used in Apple libraries.
Right; I was using loose and casual language there; I meant "bundling", not literally statically-linked.
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I said "statically-linked" because the first thing that came to mind was go-lang's morbidly obese executable binary sizes, and mentally walked to iOS app sizes.