Book Image

Swift Protocol-Oriented Programming - Fourth Edition

By : Jon Hoffman
Book Image

Swift Protocol-Oriented Programming - Fourth Edition

By: Jon Hoffman

Overview of this book

Protocol-oriented programming is an incredibly powerful concept at the heart of Swift's design. Swift's standard library was developed using POP techniques, generics, and first-class value semantics; therefore, it is important for every Swift developer to understand these core concepts and take advantage of them. The fourth edition of this book is improved and updated to the latest version of the Swift programming language. This book will help you understand what protocol-oriented programming is all about and how it is different from other programming paradigms such as object-oriented programming. This book covers topics such as generics, Copy-On-Write, extensions, and of course protocols. It also demonstrates how to use protocol-oriented programming techniques via real-world use cases. By the end of this book, you will know how to use protocol-oriented programming techniques to build powerful and practical applications.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Generics in the Swift standard library

Generics are used extensively within the Swift standard library and they allow 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 from the main page, you will see the documentation on the array type. The documentation looks 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.