Book Image

Swift Data Structure and Algorithms

By : Mario Eguiluz Alebicto
Book Image

Swift Data Structure and Algorithms

By: Mario Eguiluz Alebicto

Overview of this book

Apple’s Swift language has expressive features that are familiar to those working with modern functional languages, but also provides backward support for Objective-C and Apple’s legacy frameworks. These features are attracting many new developers to start creating applications for OS X and iOS using Swift. Designing an application to scale while processing large amounts of data or provide fast and efficient searching can be complex, especially running on mobile devices with limited memory and bandwidth. Learning about best practices and knowing how to select the best data structure and algorithm in Swift is crucial to the success of your application and will help ensure your application is a success. That’s what this book will teach you. Starting at the beginning, this book will cover the basic data structures and Swift types, and introduce asymptotic analysis. You’ll learn about the standard library collections and bridging between Swift and Objective-C collections. You will see how to implement advanced data structures, sort algorithms, work with trees, advanced searching methods, use graphs, and performance and algorithm efficiency. You’ll also see how to choose the perfect algorithm for your problem.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Swift Data Structure and Algorithms
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Understanding mutability and immutability


Swift doesn't require that you define separate mutable and immutable types. When you create an array, set, or dictionary variable using the var keyword, it will be created as a mutable object. You can modify it by adding, removing, or changing the value of items in the collection. If you create an array, set, or dictionary using the let keyword, you are creating a constant object. A constant collection type cannot be modified, either by adding or removing items, or by changing the value of items in the collection.

Mutability of collections

When working with collection types, you need to understand how Swift treats mutability between structs and classes. Some developers tend to get confused when working with constant class instances because their properties can still be modified.

When you create an instance of a structure and assign it to a constant, you cannot modify properties of that instance, even if they are declared as variables. This is not true...