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)

Issues with object-oriented design

Two of the issues that we saw with the object-oriented design were directly related to each other and are the result of Swift being a single-inheritance language. Remember a single-inheritance language is a language that limits a class to having not more than one superclass.

Object-oriented design with a single-inheritance language, such as Swift, can lead to bloated superclasses because we may need to include functionality that is needed by only a few of the subclasses. This leads to the second issue related to Swift being a single-inheritance language, which is the inheritance of functionality that a type does not need.

In our design, we had to include the functionality for all three terrain types because the vehicle types may be able to move or attack in any of the terrain types. This extra functionality may lead to errors in our code if we...