perhaps it should have been obvious in foresight, but the 5.10 compiler is even more unreliable than the 5.9 compiler. one could hardly blame it for crashing or miscompiling code, as 5.10 is experimental and makes no claim of being production-ready, so i did not think it was worthwhile to continue exploring this direction.
so: it would appear that getting 5.9.2 to work on Amazon Linux 2023 is the only path forward. but despite expending countless hours trying to build the toolchain from source, i could not compile a basic project with the custom built toolchains, as i must have built it incorrectly which causes SIL verification to fail somehow. (more on that here.)
investigating why SILModuleTransform "MandatoryInlining" is hitting assertions that the official toolchain does not is an interesting tangent, but unfortunately it is not reasonable for us to spend the rest of Q1 2024 debugging the swift compiler.
the blocking issue here is that the official swift docker images are no longer compatible with VSCode, because VSCode has bumped its Glibc requirement. are there any (realistic) options for those of us who wish to continue using swift on the server, without holding back VSCode from updating indefinitely?