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

Summary


In this chapter, we explored the origins of ARC, the performant memory management paradigm available in Swift. With great power comes great responsibility, so you're still required to design your memory model with ARC in mind; failing to do so will lead to memory leaks or crashes caused by dangling pointers. By now, you should be comfortable with the advantages and drawbacks of both weak and unowned references. You should also understand why weak or unowned don't apply to value types. Last but not least, you should now be comfortable with setting your project up to efficiently debug memory with the tools from Xcode.

ARC sits at the compiler level, injected into your code as it is built. In the next chapter, we'll continue to refresh the basics and stretch our muscles, as we explore Foundation and the standard library.