Book Image

Hands-On Design Patterns with Swift

By : Florent Vilmart, Giordano Scalzo, Sergio De Simone
Book Image

Hands-On Design Patterns with Swift

By: Florent Vilmart, Giordano Scalzo, Sergio De Simone

Overview of this book

Swift keeps gaining traction not only amongst Apple developers but also as a server-side language. This book demonstrates how to apply design patterns and best practices in real-life situations, whether that's for new or already existing projects. You’ll begin with a quick refresher on Swift, the compiler, the standard library, and the foundation, followed by the Cocoa design patterns – the ones at the core of many cocoa libraries – to follow up with the creational, structural, and behavioral patterns as defined by the GoF. You'll get acquainted with application architecture, as well as the most popular architectural design patterns, such as MVC and MVVM, and learn to use them in the context of Swift. In addition, you’ll walk through dependency injection and functional reactive programming. Special emphasis will be given to techniques to handle concurrency, including callbacks, futures and promises, and reactive programming. These techniques will help you adopt a test-driven approach to your workflow in order to use Swift Package Manager and integrate the framework into the original code base, along with Unit and UI testing. By the end of the book, you'll be able to build applications that are scalable, faster, and easier to maintain.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
Index

ARC – what is that?


Automatic Reference Counting was introduced at the 2011 WWDC, in Session 323. If you want to see the original presentation, feel free to visit https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2011/323/

ARC is made possible by Clang and LLVM. LLVM and Clang are two technologies that enable compiling C, C++, and Objective-C code. LLVM is also used alongside the Swift compiler. With ARC, a Clang feature, developers don't have to write the tedious retain and release calls. There are multiple benefits to letting the compiler handle it, as follows:

  • Memory management is difficult
  • The compiler is often more correct than you are
  • There are fewer lines of code to write
  • It has the same performance as manual reference counting

With Swift being a modern language and the successor of Objective-C, you've never had to call retain. Swift programs leverage ARC, in order to simplify memory management. In Swift, there are multiple memory management concepts to master, and we'll cover them in this...