It's not really a fully finished project yet, so not much. We shipped the AWS SDK for JS v3 with Smithy, the AWS SDK for Go v2 with Smithy, and just launched an alpha of the AWS SDK for Rust using Smithy. More are in the works. We're currently iterating on their code generators to make them easier to use outside the AWS SDKs. AWS SDKs are being built in a layered approach where there's a generic code generator that's really extensible, and then the AWS SDKs extend it to add AWS-specific stuff like regions and credential handling.
I gather the impact of Smithy is to generate something like an old style CORBA client/server stubs and vocabulary types for a given serialization, and communication schema (HTTP2, gRPC) in a target language? Is Smithy specific to interoperating with AWS services or can used in pretty much any distributed system?
Pretty much, but Smithy can be used for anything and isn’t specific to AWS. The AWS modeling support in Smithy is all through extensions that aren’t part of the core.
It’s also protocol agnostic and can be used in a lot of applications (HTTP, MQTT, and we are even experimenting using Smithy to generate C ABI bindings for non client server stuff).
We're working to get projects like these to GA: https://github.com/awslabs/smithy-typescript, https://github.com/aws/smithy-go, and https://github.com/awslabs/smithy-rs. And we're also working on service code generation.