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

Data structures


We are going to implement the vertex and edge entities using an approach with structs, generics, and protocols. We are going to start building the basic blocks (vertex, edge), and then we will create further data structures on top of them (adjacency list, graph), and so on.

Vertex

We are going to add a new struct to represent the vertex entity. Create a new playground file in Xcode and name it B05101_7_AdjacencyList. In the Sources folder, add a new Swift file and name it Vertex.swift. Add the following code to this file:

public struct Vertex<T:Equatable>:Equatable {
    public var data:T
    public let index:Int
}

We have defined the Vertex struct and we have indicated that it uses some generic type, T. We also defined that the generic T must be Equatable. Conforming to the Equatable protocol helps us to make comparisons later.

What do we need to store enough information to represent a vertex? You can see that we defined two properties: some data of generic...