duplicates:

• SR-1520 Create Static Libraries with Swift

Issue Description:

Today we cannot build static libraries that contain Swift code. Only dynamic libraries (Frameworks) are supported.

For iOS apps this has a significant disadvantage related to slower app launch time.
Apple recommends having not more than 6 frameworks loaded dynamically (https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2016/406/).

For larger Swift apps this constraint (6 dylibs) is too restrictive. One reason is modularization - it's easier for the development cycles and speed of iteration to work with smaller modules, and also to be able to use 3rd party Swift libraries. Another reason to use more modules is build speed. We've found Swift compiler's build times to be impacted badly as the number of files per module grows.

For those reasons, we need to be able to link statically, so we can modularize our application properly, iterate faster and easier, and not impact application boot times with dylib overhead.