It seems like the major point of this release is just to provide ABI stability. What real world implications does this have?
It makes it easier for Apple and others to adopt swift on a large scale. It will probably mean new swift only frameworks will be developed by Apple after swift 5.
Another major point is that they seem to be copying the memory model of Rust.
a good concurrency story looks 2 years out :( 5 will lay some foundations, hopefully Swift 6 will complete the story.
a "systems" language w/o a concurrency story isn't very compelling.