Book Image

Swift 3 Object-Oriented Programming - Second Edition

By : Gaston C. Hillar
Book Image

Swift 3 Object-Oriented Programming - Second Edition

By: Gaston C. Hillar

Overview of this book

Swift has quickly become one of the most-liked languages and developers’ de-facto choice when building applications that target iOS and macOS. In the new version, the Swift team wants to take its adoption to the next level by making it available for new platforms and audiences. This book introduces the object-oriented paradigm and its implementation in the Swift 3 programming language to help you understand how real-world objects can become part of fundamental reusable elements in the code. This book is developed with XCode 8.x and covers all the enhancements included in Swift 3.0. In addition, we teach you to run most of the examples with the Swift REPL available on macOS and Linux, and with a Web-based Swift sandbox developed by IBM capable of running on any web browser, including Windows and mobile devices. You will organize data in blueprints that generate instances. You’ll work with examples so you understand how to encapsulate and hide data by working with properties and access control. Then, you’ll get to grips with complex scenarios where you use instances that belong to more than one blueprint. You’ll discover the power of contract programming and parametric polymorphism. You’ll combine generic code with inheritance and multiple inheritance. Later, you’ll see how to combine functional programming with object-oriented programming and find out how to refactor your existing code for easy maintenance.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Swift 3 ObjectOriented Programming - Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Understanding deinitialization and its customization


At some specific times, our app won't need to work with an instance anymore. For example, once you calculate the perimeter of a regular hexagon and display the results to the user, you don't need the specific RegularHexagon instance anymore. Some programming languages require you to be careful about leaving live instances alive, and you have to explicitly destroy them and deallocate the memory that it consumed.

Swift uses an automatic reference counting, also known as ARC, to automatically deallocate the memory used by instances that aren't being referenced anymore. When Swift detects that you aren't referencing an instance anymore, Swift executes the code specified within the instance's deinitializer before the instance is deallocated from memory. Thus, the deinitializer can still access all of the instance's resources.

Note

You can think of deinitializers as equivalents of destructors in other programming languages such as C# and Java....