Swift Pattern Matching with Extra Conditions, and the Value of Syntax Summaries

Natalia Panferova writes about Swift enum pattern matching with extra conditions and goes over:

  • switch-case statements,
  • switch-case statements with where clauses,
  • for-in loops with where clauses,
  • while loops with extra conditions (case let matching),
  • if-case statements.
  • (Missing, for completion: catch ... where in try-catch blocks.)

I believe there’s tremendous value in summaries like these to learn the Swift programming language and its syntax: these short summaries show a slice of different aspects of the language in close proximity.

The Swift language book tells you all about the structural programming features one after another in the Control Flow chapter: if, for, while, etc.

It also has a section on where, but that’s limited to the switch conditional statement.

The section on for loops doesn’t mention where clauses at all! You need to go to the Language Reference part of the book, where the formal grammar is explained, to read that a where-clause? is allowed.

for-in-statement → for case? pattern in expression where-clause? code-block

So a post like Natalia’s reminds us about the similarity of different aspects of the Swift programming language.

It’s zooming in on where-clauses, and so the reader gets to know a different “view” into the syntax as a whole that is different from the book’s presentation.

This should be very valuable to get from beginner-level understanding of “I can do things in Swift” to a deeper understanding of recognizing similarities across different aspects of the programming language.

These should, in my opinion, be included in the language’s handbook to help with “deep learning”. Until then, I’m glad we have posts like Natalia’s!

The Difference between Entity and Value Object, and How They Relate to Swift's Identifiable and Equatable Protocols

Helge Heß recently posted on Mastodon that he “still find[s] it disturbing how many #SwiftLang devs implement Equatable as something that breaks the Equatable contract, just to please some API requiring it. Feels like they usually should implement Identifiable and build on top of that instead.”

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Weak Self -- Closure Rules of Thumb

In Swift, you can weak-ify references to self in escaping closures, and then you need to deal with the case that the reference is gone when the block is called. Last month, Benoit Pasquier and Chris Downie presented different takes on the problem. That discussion was excellent. It prompted me to take some more time to revisit this problem systematically, and I took away a couple of notes for future-me.

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The Beauty of Hacking Swift: Make Union of Set Algebra Types More Obvious

I found it weird to form the union of two CharacterSet instances by calling the union method on one element: This chains nicely, but what pops out to me looking at the line of code is the CharacterSet, then something about URLs, and then I scan the line to see what kind of statement this is – some lengthy stuff that looks like chained method calls at first glance due to the length and the many dots.

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XCTestExpectation via NSPredicate Is On a Slow Interval, Use This Instead

You and I are probably pretty familiar with the XCTestExpectations helper expectation(description:) that we can .fulfill() in an async callback, and then wait in the test case for that to happen. When you have neither async callbacks or notifications handy from which you can create test expectations, then there’s a NSPredicate-based version, too. Like all NSPredicates, it works with key–value-coding, or with block-based checks. These run periodically to check if the predicate resolves to “true”.

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Demonstrate Swift's Lazy Initialization of Static Attributes Even when Using a Property Wrapper

I wanted to make sure that I’m up-to-date in regards to Swift’s lazy initialization of static attributes. So here’s a demonstration of a Swift property wrapper that produces debug output to check what’s going on, aka caveman debugging (because of the log statement, y’know). The output is as follows, demonstrating that the static var is initialized lazily when you access it:

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Win32 API Programming With Swift

With some luck, all my Windows programming wet dream might actually come true one day. There’s progress on making Swift available on Windows, and there’s progress on providing a Win32 API wrapper for Swift so you can share model code across platforms and write UI for Windows and Mac separately.

Check out the GitHub repo: https://github.com/compnerd/swift-win32

It’s experimental, but apparently way less experimental than it was a year ago!

How to Fix fileReferenceURL() to Work with NSURL in Swift 3 and Swift 4

I am upgrading the code base of the Word Counter to Swift 3. Yeah, you read that right. I didn’t touch the Swift code base for almost 2 years now. Horrible, I know – and I’m punished for deferring this so long in every module I try to convert and build. One very interesting problem was runtime crashes in a submodule I build where URLs were nil all of a sudden. This code from 2015 (!!) used to work:

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Exposing the MultiMarkdown 6 Library to Swift, Part 1: Swifty Enums

During the time between Christmas and New Year, which we tend to call the time “between the years” where I live in Germany, I wanted to do something fun, but not too fun so I don’t get spoiled. That’s how I turned up experimenting to use libMultiMarkdown from within a Swift app. The amount of fun I have when reading and writing C code is negligible, which made it a perfect fit.

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Dependency Injection via the Recent "Cake Pattern in Swift" Pattern is Useless in Practice

Dependency Injection means you do not create objects where you use them but “inject” objects a function/method/object depends on from outside. This is a useful trick to make code testable, for example. Once you adopt the mindset, it becomes second nature. From the Java world stems the imperative to program against interfaces, not implementations. In Swift, this means to define injected dependencies not as concrete types but as protocols.

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How to Use NSGlyph in Swift

I couldn’t find a simple answer on the web at first, so here’s my take for Googlers. When you need NSGlyph (which is a UInt32), you probably want to use NSATSTypesetter.insertGlyph(_:atGlyphIndex:characterIndex:) or NSGlyphStorage.insertGlyphs(_:length:forStartingGlyphAt:characterIndex:) which in turn is implemented by NSLayoutManager. But the useful glyph types to use like NSControlGlyph are Ints. How do you get a NSGlyph-pointer from these?

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Non-Obvious Swift: Defer

The following code works as expected: But do you know what “expected” means in this case? As a reader, you assume the author had an intention. You look for the mens auctoris and are an overall benevolent reader, I hope. Presupposing said intention, you may assume that it does something special if you put the call to items.removeAll() in a defer block.

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Express Either–Or-Relationships as Enums

If you want to encapsulate the notion of “either A or B” (also called “lifting” in functional parlance), an enum type in Swift is the best fit: You can use associated values to wrap types with enums, too: These things seem to be expressible through a common ancestor type or protocol. But bananas and apples can be modeled in totally different manners (apart from sharing nutritional value, for example).

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Core Data is Invasive. You Can Hide It, Or You Can Embrace It

Found this nice post about using Swift protocols to expose read-only properties of Core Data managed objects so you don’t couple your whole app to Core Data. Using Swift protocols in Core Data NSManagedObjects is a great way to limit the visibility of properties and methods. In my 1st book on Mac app development I talked about this, too, and this is a lot easier to handle than a custom layer of structs that you have to map to NSManagedObject and back again. Core Data is designed to be invasive and convenient. It’s not designed to be used as a simple object-relational mapper.

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Better Swift FileManager File Existence Checks

I found the Foundation way to check for file existence very roundabout. It returns 1 boolean to indicate existence and you can have another boolean indicate if the item is a directory – passed by reference, like you used to in Objective-C land. That’s a silent cry for an enum. So I created a simple wrapper that tells me what to expect at a given URL:

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Shopify's Ruby on Rails app statistics

Shopify published amazing/epic stats for their Ruby on Rails “app”:

  • 860k LoC
  • 1:1.3 code–test ratio
  • 2300 model classes
  • most classes <10 methods
  • most methods way <10 lines

Makes you wonder:

  • can you live with more types?
  • can you shrink down existing types?

Swift changed the game a bit. Now it’s very convenient to create a new type. You don’t need to do the .h/.m file dance anymore but can start a new type declaration wherever you are. (Except when you’re inside a generic type.) That makes it more likely we devs stop to shy away from smaller types.

But it’s still a job for our community’s culture to unlearn coding huge classes (massive view controller syndrome, anyone?) and splitting stuff.

Ruby has a long tradition of super-focused methods and very small classes. Swift is just as terse and powerful in that regard. Now it’s your turn to experiment with writing types for very simple tasks. Like the Extract Parameter Object refactoring, where you lift things that go together into a new type.

Can be as easy as writing:

struct DateRange {
    let start: Date
    let end: Date
}

Et voilà, there you have a new explicit concept in your code base.

Swift 2.3 NSLocale UIKit API Changes Break iOS 8 Compatibility

We’re converting a rather big and clumsy project to Swift 2.3 at the moment. Strangely, NSLocale gives us a lot of headaches. The API hasn’t changed visibly, but the implementation seems to have. From Objective-C’s point of view: And from Swift’s: That property certainly isn’t new. Neither are the dozen others in that header file from Foundation.

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Assertions in Swift Kill Your Code

Swift.assert bit me, and it bit pretty hard. What do you expect to happen in this code: … compared to this code: If your answer is “only the second variant will actually execute sendAction in release builds,” then you’re way smarter than I. Until now I assumed that Swift.assert behaves similar to assertion macros in Objective-C where the code is passed through in release builds. I never cared to read the documentation:

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Implementing CollectionType in Swift 2.x

I ran into trouble with custom collections the other day and wondered how to reliably find out what the bare minimum for a custom CollectionType is. The compiler will only help a bit: It’s conforming to neither CollectionType nor SequenceType. Now I know SequenceType requires the generate() method – but don’t let this fool you. CollectionType will provide that for you if you meet its requirements.

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I love Swift's Expressiveness

Take optionals, for example. Optionals demarcate when something’s not there at all. When an optional is nil, this may signify something went wrong. That’s much more explicit than relying on a convention like returning -1 for failed requests. This is convenient and changes the game of handling edge cases completely. Because whenever you receive an optional, you have to deal with its two-fold nature. Checking for -1 can slip your mind. Forgetting to unwrap an optional is unlikely.

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objc.io Books 30% Off

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books screenshot

All 3 amazingly useful objc.io books are 30% off this week. Grab all three of them in a bundle and save even more.

If you use my link, I’ll even get a small kickback thanks to their affiliate program. I wholeheartedly recommend you take at least the time to read the samples. The team updates their ebooks regularly, and you’ll get a Swift 3.0 edition later this year, too.

Configuration Objects and the Then Microframework

When parameter lists grow or two kinds of parameters seem to go together a lot, it’s time use the extract parameter object refactoring for greater good – then you can even specify sensible defaults.

This is a typical way to pass a set of options to an objects during initialization in a language like Swift. In languages like JavaScript or Ruby, dictionaries of key–value pairs can work just as well. Using dictionaries in Swift for this can be a pain, though.

Now Soroush wrote about a way that uses the Then microframework as a replacement for configuaration dictionaries. This way you don’t have to promote every property to the initializer’s list of parameters. Here’s a before and after, where you can see that without then you have to write a lot of repeating boilerplate:

// Before

struct FieldData {
    let title: String
    let placeholder: String
    let keyboardType: UIKeyboardType
    let secureEntry: Bool
    let autocorrectType: UITextAutocorrectionType
    let autocapitalizationType: UITextAutocapitalizationType

    init(title: String,
        placeholder: String = "",
        keyboardType: UIKeyboardType = .Default,
        secureEntry: Bool = false,
        autocorrectType: UITextAutocorrectionType = .None,
        autocapitalizationType: UITextAutocapitalizationType = .None)
        {
            self.title = title
            self.placeholder = placeholder
            self.keyboardType = keyboardType
            self.secureEntry = secureEntry
            self.autocorrectType = autocorrectType
            self.autocapitalizationType = autocapitalizationType
    }
}

let fieldData = FieldData(title: "Password", secureEntry: true)

Now with then, making non-mandatory properties mutable and getting rid of the boilerplate:

// After

struct FieldData {
    let title: String
    var placeholder = ""
    var keyboardType = UIKeyboardType.Default
    var secureEntry = false
    var autocorrectType = UITextAutocorrectionType.No
    var autocapitalizationType = UITextAutocapitalizationType.None

    init(title: String) {
        self.title = title
    }
}

let fieldData = FieldData(title: "Password").then({
    $0.secureEntry = true
})

That’s a Swift alternative to Ruby’s hash-based option initializers. There, the dictionary’s key is used as the setter’s name which is then invoked like so:

class Example
  attr_reader :name, :age
  
  def initialize(args)
    args.each do |k,v|
      instance_variable_set("@#{k}", v) unless v.nil?
    end
  end
end

e1 = Example.new :name => 'foo', :age => 33
#=> #<Example:0x3f9a1c @name="foo", @age=33>

Principles of Object-Oriented Design in Swift 2.2

Understanding Uncle Bob’s Principles of Object-Oriented Design (which resulted in the SOLID principles) is super important to really grasp the use of design patterns (like MVVM) and architectural patterns (like VIPER). It’s like the grammar for crafting proper object-oriented software.

And now here’s the good news: there is a Swift playground (and Markdown file to read online) that illustrates all the principles by Uncle Bob: The Principles of OOD in Swift 2.2

Check it out, take notes, and keep the principles close to your heart. They may save your life someday.

Custom Enumerated Sequences in Just 1 Line of Code

In “Creating a Cheap Protocol-Oriented Copy of SequenceType (with a Twist!)” I created my own indexedEnumerate() to return a special kind of enumeration: instead of a tuple of (Int, Element), I wanted to have a tuple of (Index, Element), where Index was a UInt starting at 1. A custom CollectionType can have a different type of index than Int, so I was quite disappointed that the default enumerate() simply returns a sequence with a counter for the elements at first.

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How to Get Started with Swift: Write New Tests in Swift

Daniel Jalkut of MarsEdit fame is slowly getting up to speed with Swift. I have a few Swift-only projects already (Move!, TableFlip and secret in-progress ones). On top of that, every feature I add to the Word Counter is a Swift module, too. The main code of the Word Counter is still in Objective-C, though.

Integrating new types to the project using Swift is awkward. There’re things you can only use in one direction. Most if not all Objective-C code can be made available for Swift and works great. The other way around, not so much. Also, Objective-C imports from the -Swift.h file won’t be available in Swift-based test targets. So you’ll have to isolate these even further, create wrappers, or whatever. Porting a class to Swift can work, but the side effects on testing make it harder.

I like Daniel’s advice to write your unit tests in Swift if you’re still not certain if you should make the switch to this new and volative language. It’s a good idea to get your feet wet.

Considering the problems I ran into with the Word Counter, though, I wouldn’t know how, honestly.

The Power of Guard

Here’s a guard statement with many different kinds of features by Benedikt Terhechte:

guard let messageids = overview.headers["message-id"],
    messageid = messageids.first,
    case .MessageId(_, let msgid) = messageid
    where msgid == self.originalMessageID
    else { return print("Unknown Message-ID:", overview) }

I love guard statements. It helps make code much more readable and keep methods un-intended.

I feel less amorous about guard-case and if-case matching, though:

if case .Fruit = foodType { ... }

This reads an awful lot like Yoda conditions where you place the constant portion on the left side. This isn’t even a typical boolean test (which would use the equality operator ==) but a failable assignment (=). I can force myself to read and write it this way, but it always feels backward to me. It took me quite a while to memorize this, which I found surprising, as it was comparatively easy to learn Swift in the first place.

Apart from the guard-case portion, the example contains your standard guard-let unwrapping. The else clause is special though, and I didn’t know this would work:

guard someCondition else { return print("a problem") }

When the function is of return type Void, you can return a call to another void function. This is shorter than splitting these two instructions on two lines, but it’s too clever for every reader to understand. print("a problem"); return is just as compact, as Terhechte points out.

The Swift Developer's Cookbook Review

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Although I knew there’s a “cookbook” book series, I haven’t read any of these before I read Erica Sadun’s The Swift Developer’s Handbook. The code listings are called “recipes”, and most of the time rightly so: I bet I copied about a dozen of the recipes into my own handy code snippet index to extend Swift’s capabilities with super useful things like safe Array indexes.

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Swift Selector Syntax Sugar

The gist of the article is that we can omit the verbose #selector syntax by adding a convenience property:

private extension Selector {
    static let buttonTapped = 
        #selector(ViewController.buttonTapped(_:))
}
...
button.addTarget(self, action: .buttonTapped, 
    forControlEvents: .TouchUpInside)

I’d make that not private but internal and group these in a struct to separate them from other Selector stuff:

extension Selector {
    // One for each view module ...
    struct Banana {
        static let changeSizeTapped = 
            #selector(BananaViewController.changeSizeTapped(_:))
    }

    struct Potato {
        static let peelSelected = 
            #selector(PotatoViewController.peelSelected(_:))
    }
}

// ...

button.addTarget(self, action: .Potato.peelSelected, 
    forControlEvents: .TouchUpInside)

Great tip!

Import Parts of a Module

Did you know you can import only parts of a module? Found this in the Swiftz sample codes:

let xs = [1, 2, 0, 3, 4]

import protocol Swiftz.Semigroup
import func Swiftz.sconcat
import struct Swiftz.Min

//: The least element of a list can be had with the Min Semigroup.
let smallestElement = sconcat(Min(2), t: xs.map { Min($0) }).value() // 0

import protocol or even import func were very new to me. Handy!

rethrows in Swift

Rethrows saves us a lot of duplicate code. Look at my naive approach to write an iterator in Swift 1 from last year which I later extended for throwing with Swift 2:

extension Array {
    func each(@noescape iterator: (Element) -> Void) {
        for element in self {
            iterator(element)
        }
    }
    
    func each(@noescape iterator: (Element) throws -> Void) throws {
        for element in self {
            try iterator(element)
        }
    }
}

This can be written as a single method with Swift 2 as I later found out:

extension Array {
    func each(@noescape iterator: (Element) throws -> Void) rethrows {
        for element in self {
            try iterator(element)
        }
    }
}

The rethrows keyword makes the method a throwing one depending on the closure you pass in. Only if the closure throws each will throw, too. The compiler will know what happens – just like generic functions are write-once, use-many-times.

Of course I later found out that Swift 2 came with forEach already bundled in. So there’s no use in this anymore except for this very illustrative blog post to remember that throws/rethrows is different from throws/throws.

I'll be writing a Word Counter Swift module fully East-Oriented

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The Word Counter is my biggest software project so far, and it’s growing. To add features, I discovered the use of Swift modules with joy. I can write code for all levels of the new feature in isolation in a new project that compiles fast. Later I plug the resulting project and module into the Word Counter, et voilà: feature finished.

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Swift OS X Programming for Absolute Beginners Review

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Recently on Google+, someone recommended Wallace Wang’s Swift OS X Programming for Absolute Beginners. Well, I’m not a beginner anymore, but the book sounded fun, so I gave it a spin. And I’m quite impressed. That’s why you read the review here. In short, Swift OS X Programming for Absolute Beginners (or SOXPAB as I would like to call it to save myself from typing that much) is the best programming book to teach the reader about user interface programming. I can’t honestly judge how well this textbook will actually work for non-programmers. But that’s because I can’t fathom learning to code from a book anyway. If you know programming, or the Cocoa APIs already, this should work for you.

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Swift Protocol Extensions as Mixins – And How Do You Test That?

I found a very useful distinction by Matthijs Hollemans to grasp what protocol extensions in Swift 2 can be: instead of interfaces, they are traits or even mixins. At the same time, I want to raise awareness for misuse: just because behavior is mixed-in doesn’t mean it’s additional behavior. The code may live in another file, but its functionality can still clutter your objects.

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Using Guard in Unit Tests

I have just discovered how cool the new guard statement is to keep unit tests lean and shallow – avoiding if-let nesting, that is. Update 2021-05-11: Modern XCTUnwrap is even better. Consider this test case: There are two optionals I have to deal with. That’s why I throw in assertions to cover problems. I don’t want to assert anything new here, though: the test helper soleFile() is valdiated in another test case already. But I need some kind of failure in case the Core Data test case goes nuts.

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Refactoring Legacy Code: Replace Free Function in Tests, Even Swift's Own Functions

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Refactoring Legacy Code is hard. There are a few safe refactorings you can do with caution. But most chirurgical cuts require you to put the code in a test harness first to guard against regression. With C and Swift, you can create free functions as part of your app. To verify your objects use that function, you need to find a way to insert a test double.

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Protocol Madness: Comparing Apples to Oranges from the Vantage Point of Fruit

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Brent Simmons starts with Swift. And just as I, he struggles with value types, protocols, and generics: once a protocol references another or has a dependency on Self, you cannot use it as a type constraint or placeholder for all descending objects. You either have to use generics to expose a variant for each concrete type, or you re-write the protocol. There’s no equivalent to the way Objective-C did this: something like id<TheProtocol> just doesn’t exist. Swift is stricter. So how do you deal with that?

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Be Cautious with Try-Catch for error handling in Swift 2.0

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Throwing exceptions and being able to catch them is awesome news. Then there are cases which can be handled with try-catch technically, but shouldn’t. Think about this: in what cases could you make use of that? And what are the consequences for your work? For example, Erica Sadun points out that accessing array indexes out of bounds as a subscript will still crash the app since you can’t catch that kind of exception (yet).

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Test doubles for Core Data managed objects might not work as expected

You don’t have to learn anything new if you work with Core Data in Swift. It’s a pain to use NSManagedObject directly, so you better work with custom subclasses all the time. Unboxing optional NSNumbers is just too cumbersome. There are caveats you should be aware of, though: Swift’s static typing makes it a bit harder to write test doubles for managed objects.

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Swift Extensions and Information Hiding

Andrew Bancroft tested and analyzed the behavior of extensions in Swift.
While his findings aren’t utterly surprising, having them summed up in this nicely done article certainly helps.

In a nutshell:

  • extensions in the same file as their source can access even privat members (attributes and methods, that is)
  • extensions in different files can access internal and public members – but only if they are in the same module
  • if extensions are in a different module, they merely have access to public members
  • classes with public or internal visibility on themselves expose their members as internal by default
  • classes with private visibility on themselves expose their members as private
  • extensions themselves don’t have to be public for public members to work (unlike classes)

This has consequences for your tests: they reside in a separate module, so they can only access public members of your classes.

If you extend classes from static libraries, the same holds true. Different module, only public accessors.

Functional Programming in Swift (YouTube Videos)

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After the latest change in my diet, I eat a lot more often throughout the day and try to spend the time watching educational talks to make use of my time. Functional programming seems to not only be all the hype – its concepts seem to reach mainstream thinking, too. Here’s a collection of talks you might find worth your while.

If you got some useful talks, share them in the comments!

Going Beyond Guard Clauses in Swift

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Erica Sadun brought up a topic which is bugging me for some time already. It’s how Swift encourages you to handle optionals. It’s related to handling exceptions, which I covered earlier. Either you use if-let to unwrap them implicitly and do all the stuff inside the nested code block, or you end up with code which is a lot wordier than I’d like it to be.

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Functional Error Handling in Swift Without Exceptions

In Swift, there’s no exception handling or throwing. If you can’t use exceptions for control flow like you would in Java, what else are you going to do if you (a) write library code which executes a failing subroutine, and (b) you find unwrapping optionals too cumbersome? I played with the thought of keeping Swift code clean, avoiding the use of optionals, while maintaining their intent to communicate failing operations.

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Thinking in Terms of Functional Programming Encourages Clean Factoring of Code

Chris Eidhof provided an excellent example for creating a mini Swift networking library. It executes simple requests and can be extended to work with JSON (or XML, if you must) without any change. The accompanying talk is worth watching, too. You should check it out to see well-factored Swift code in action. It’s a great example.

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