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Book Overview & Buying
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Table Of Contents
Mastering Swift 6 - Seventh Edition
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In Swift, the Mirror API enables reflection, making it possible to inspect the properties, types, and values of instances at runtime.
In this chapter, we showed how we could use the Mirror API to inspect the properties of a structure and class, revealing details such as property names and values, and even the instance’s display style and underlying type category. Advanced use cases for the Mirror API include debugging complex data structures, custom serialization, and dynamically exploring class hierarchies, including superclass properties. However, while the Mirror API can be used for serialization by manually iterating over properties, it is not designed for handling complex or nested data structures as robustly as the Codable protocol.
There are also performance implications to consider, as reflection requires more computing resources than direct access methods and is not recommended for performance-critical parts of an application.
In the next chapter...