Weekly Swift articles, podcasts and tips by John Sundell.
Weekly Swift articles, podcasts and tips by John Sundell.
Deciding whether or not to generalize a piece of code to fit more than one use case can sometimes be quite tricky. This week, let’s take a look at a few key factors that can help us strike a nice balance between being able to reuse as much of our code as possible, while also avoiding making things too complicated or ambiguous in the process.
Deploying generics in a more gentle fashion — to make a code base simpler, not more complicated.
Swift enables us to create generic types, protocols, and functions, that aren’t tied to any specific concrete type — but can instead be used with any type that meets a given set of requirements. Let’s take a look at how generics work in Swift, and how to create our own.
A situation that most Swift developers will encounter at one point or another is when some form of type erasure is needed to be able to reference a generic protocol. This week, let’s start by taking a look at what makes type erasure such an essential technique in Swift, and then explore different “flavors” of implementing it — and how each flavor comes with its own set of pros and cons.
When using syntactic sugar, what we ideally want is to be able to strike a nice balance between low verbosity and clarity, and this week, let’s take a look at a few different ways that type aliases can enable us to do just that.
Protocols continue to be an integral part of Swift, both in terms of how the language itself is designed, and also in how the standard library is structured. This week, let's take a look at how we can use protocols to create multiple levels of abstraction, and increasingly specialize them to become more and more specific to each use case.
Let’s take a look at how the Swift 4.2 compiler is able to automatically synthesize conditional conformances to the Equatable and Hashable protocols.
This week, let's take a look at Swift 4.1's new Conditional Conformances feature, and how it enables us to design code in a much more recursive fashion, making it more flexible while also reducing duplication. We'll take a look at both a simple and more advanced example, and how the standard library uses this new feature.
Using generic type constraints, we are able to add new APIs and behaviors to a type only under a certain set of constraints. This week, let's take a look at some techniques and patterns that are made possible because of type constraints, and how they can be used in practice.
How type erasure can be implemented using closures, and how it can help you work around using protocols with self or associated type requirements.