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

Swift protocol-oriented programming


In Swift, you should start with a protocol and not a class. Swift protocols define a list of methods, properties, and in some cases, related types and aliases, that a type supports. The protocol forms a contract with a promise that any type that conforms to it will satisfy the requirements of the protocol. Protocols are sometimes referred to as interfaces in other languages such as Java, C#, or Go.

Dispatching

Protocols in Swift are a superset of Objective-C protocols. In Objective-C, all methods are resolved via dynamic dispatch at runtime using messaging. Swift, on the other hand, makes use of multiple dispatch techniques; by default, it uses a vtable, which lists available methods in the class. A vtable is created at compile time and contains function pointers that are accessed by the index. The compiler will use the vtable as a lookup table for translating method calls to the appropriate function pointer. If a Swift class inherits from an Objective-C...