Book Image

Swift Functional Programming - Second Edition

By : Dr. Fatih Nayebi
Book Image

Swift Functional Programming - Second Edition

By: Dr. Fatih Nayebi

Overview of this book

Swift is a multi-paradigm programming language enabling you to tackle different problems in various ways. Understanding each paradigm and knowing when and how to utilize and combine them can lead to a better code base. Functional programming (FP) is an important paradigm that empowers us with declarative development and makes applications more suitable for testing, as well as performant and elegant. This book aims to simplify the FP paradigms, making them easily understandable and usable, by showing you how to solve many of your day-to-day development problems using Swift FP. It starts with the basics of FP, and you will go through all the core concepts of Swift and the building blocks of FP. You will also go through important aspects, such as function composition and currying, custom operator definition, monads, functors, applicative functors,memoization, lenses, algebraic data types, type erasure, functional data structures, functional reactive programming (FRP), and protocol-oriented programming(POP). You will then learn to combine those techniques to develop a fully functional iOS application from scratch
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Dedication
Preface

Benefits of immutability


We already know that immutability helps safety and performance, but in a real-world application development, immutability can provide us with more benefits, which will be explained in the following sections.

Thread safety

Immutable objects are useful in multi-threaded applications because multiple threads can act on the data of immutable objects without worrying about changes to the data by other threads.

As immutable objects are closed to change, it is safe to assume that they will stay unchanged while we access the object from different threads. This assumption simplifies most of the multithreading problems that are complex to solve and maintain. For instance, we do not need to think about synchronization/locking mechanisms at all.

Suppose that we have a mutable object that includes a mutable array of a type, for example, a Product class that has four properties:

struct Producer { 
    let name: String 
    let address: String 
} 

class Product { 
    var name: String...