Book Image

Mastering Swift 5 - Fifth Edition

By : Jon Hoffman
Book Image

Mastering Swift 5 - Fifth Edition

By: Jon Hoffman

Overview of this book

Over the years, the Mastering Swift book has established itself amongst developers as a popular choice as an in-depth and practical guide to the Swift programming language. The latest edition is fully updated and revised to cover the new version: Swift 5. Inside this book, you'll find the key features of Swift 5 easily explained with complete sets of examples. From the basics of the language to popular features such as concurrency, generics, and memory management, this definitive guide will help you develop your expertise and mastery of the Swift language. Mastering Swift 5, Fifth Edition will give you an in-depth knowledge of some of the most sophisticated elements in Swift development, including protocol extensions, error handling, and closures. It will guide you on how to use and apply them in your own projects. Later, you'll see how to leverage the power of protocol-oriented programming to write flexible and easier-to-manage code. You will also see how to add the copy-on-write feature to your custom value types and how to avoid memory management issues caused by strong reference cycles.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)

Structures versus classes

You may have noticed that in the object-oriented design we used classes, while in the protocol-oriented design example we used structures. Classes, which are reference types, are one of the pillars of object-oriented programming and every major object-oriented programming language uses them. For Swift, Apple has said that we should prefer value types (structures) to reference types (classes). While this may seem odd for anyone who has extensive experience with object-oriented programming, there are several good reasons for this recommendation.

The biggest reason, in my opinion, for using structures (value types) over classes is the performance gain we get. Value types do not incur the additional overhead for reference counting that reference types incur. Value types are also stored on the stack, which provides better performance as compared to reference...