Book Image

Mastering Swift 3

Book Image

Mastering Swift 3

Overview of this book

Swift is the definitive language of Apple development today. It’s a vital part of any iOS and OS X developer’s skillset, helping them to build the most impressive and popular apps on the App Store—the sort of apps that are essential to iPhone and iPad users every day. With version 3.0, the Swift team have added new features to improve the development experience—making it easier to get the results you want and customers expect. Inside, you’ll find the key features of Swift 3.0 and quickly learn how to use the newest updates to your development advantage. From Objective-C interoperability to ARC, to closures and concurrency, this advanced Swift guide will develop your expertise and make you more fluent in this vital programming language. We give you in-depth knowledge of some of the most sophisticated elements of Swift development including protocol extensions, error-handling, design patterns, and concurrency, and guide you on how to use and apply them in your own projects. You'll see how even the most challenging design patterns and programming techniques can be used to write cleaner code and to build more performant iOS and OS X applications. By the end of this book, you’ll have a handle on effective design patterns and techniques, which means you’ll soon be writing better iOS and OS X applications with a new level of sophistication and control.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
Mastering Swift 3
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Taking the First Steps with Swift
2
Learning About Variables, Constants, Strings, and Operators

Creating strong reference cycles with closures


Earlier in this chapter, we said the best thing is that, for the most part, Swift will handle memory management for us. The for the most part section of the quote means that if everything is written in a standard way, Swift will handle the memory management of the closures for us. However, there are times where memory management fails us. Memory management will work correctly for all of the examples that we have seen in this chapter so far. It is possible to create a strong reference cycle that would prevent Swift's memory management from working correctly. Let's look at what happens if we create a strong reference cycle with closures.

A strong reference cycle may happen if we assign a closure to a property of a class instance and within that closure, we capture the instance of the class. This capture occurs because we access a property of that particular instance using self, such as self.someProperty, or we assign self to a variable or constant...