Book Image

Hands-On Design Patterns with Swift

By : Florent Vilmart, Giordano Scalzo, Sergio De Simone
Book Image

Hands-On Design Patterns with Swift

By: Florent Vilmart, Giordano Scalzo, Sergio De Simone

Overview of this book

Swift keeps gaining traction not only amongst Apple developers but also as a server-side language. This book demonstrates how to apply design patterns and best practices in real-life situations, whether that's for new or already existing projects. You’ll begin with a quick refresher on Swift, the compiler, the standard library, and the foundation, followed by the Cocoa design patterns – the ones at the core of many cocoa libraries – to follow up with the creational, structural, and behavioral patterns as defined by the GoF. You'll get acquainted with application architecture, as well as the most popular architectural design patterns, such as MVC and MVVM, and learn to use them in the context of Swift. In addition, you’ll walk through dependency injection and functional reactive programming. Special emphasis will be given to techniques to handle concurrency, including callbacks, futures and promises, and reactive programming. These techniques will help you adopt a test-driven approach to your workflow in order to use Swift Package Manager and integrate the framework into the original code base, along with Unit and UI testing. By the end of the book, you'll be able to build applications that are scalable, faster, and easier to maintain.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
Index

A brief history of reference counting


Before we get into the details of ARC, we need to rewind the time machine to a previous epoch. The year is 1988, and Objective-C is licensed by NeXT and starting to make its way into their operating system. In 1996, Apple acquires NeXT, alongside the release of OS X, a new and modern toolchain based on Objective-C. Objective-C is a strict superset of C, which means that any valid C code is valid Objective-C code, but unlike C, Objective-C has a modern and efficient memory management engine, based on reference counting.

Reference counting is a technique that accounts for the exact number of references to a particular object that exist at any given time in the memory. Once there are no references, an object, it is deallocated. This is a very different memory management technique, as compared to garbage collection, which you can find in Java or JavaScript.

Many benefits come with the use of reference counting. As there is no garbage collector, there is no...