Book Image

Swift 4 Protocol-Oriented Programming - Third Edition

By : Jon Hoffman
Book Image

Swift 4 Protocol-Oriented Programming - Third Edition

By: Jon Hoffman

Overview of this book

Swift has become the number one language used in iOS and macOS development. The Swift standard library is developed using protocol-oriented programming techniques, generics, and first-class value semantics; therefore, every Swift developer should understand these powerful concepts and how to take advantage of them in their application design. This book will help you understand the differences between object-oriented programming and protocol-oriented programming. It will demonstrate how to work with protocol-oriented programming using real-world use cases. You will gain a solid knowledge of the various types that can be used in Swift and the differences between value and reference types. You will be taught how protocol-oriented programming techniques can be used to develop very flexible and easy-to-maintain code. By the end of the book, you will have a thorough understanding of protocol-oriented programming and how to utilize it to build powerful and practical applications.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Generics in the Swift standard library


Generics are used extensively within the Swift standard library and they are what allows the Swift collection types to store instances of any type. To see this, let's go to http://swiftdoc.org/ and look at the Array type. If you click on the Array link off the main page, you will see the documentation on the Array type. The documentation will look like this:

At the top of the page, we see that the Array type is defined as struct Array<Element>. This tells us that the Array type is implemented as a generic value type using a structure. If we now look at the Set, we will see that it is also implemented as a generic structure.