Tag Archives: swift

Programming

Swift Types

If you look at the Swift Language guide, you get the distinct impression that the type system is sleek and modern. However the more you dig into it the more eccentricities you find.

The one I’m going to look at today makes sense only if you look at the problem domain from a slightly skewed perspective. I’ve been trying to think whether this is a sensible, pragmatic way of designing a language or a mistake. Judge for yourself.

So, the feature. Let’s define a dictionary:

var test1 = [ "Foo" : "Bar" ]

Check the type and we find that it’s of type Dictionary<String,String>. The generics and type inference are doing exactly what you’d image.

test1["Test"] = "Works"

So basically it’s all good.

So, what type is this expression?

var test2 = [:]

And why does this not work?

test2["Test"] = "Doesn't work"

Let’s take a step back. What’s the problem? Well, [:] is an empty dictionary but give us no clue what the type is. Remember, Swift dictionaries and arrays use generics, so the compiler only allows objects of a particular type to be added.

A good guess for the type would be Dictionary<AnyObject,AnyObject>. But a little fishing around tells you that’s not the case because AnyObject is neither “Hashable” or “Equatable” and keys need to be both.

The answer? test2 is an NSDictionary. That is, in this one circumstance, Swift extends outside its native dictionary type and decides to use a class found in Foundation.

Once you know that, it is clear that the second line should be:

test2.setValue("Does work now", forKey:"Test")

Maybe if you’re familiar with the guts of both Objective C and Swift this behaviour makes sense, but a language built-in returning a completely different type just because it can’t figure out the type feels broken to me.

In the end I think I’ve convinced myself that, while it might be convenient to allow this syntax, it’s a bad idea to saddle the language with these semantics so early on. In a few years when no one uses Objective C or when Swift is no longer fully tied to Cocoa, will this make sense?

I would prefer to see it being a compiler error with the correct approach being explicit with the type:

var test2:Dictionary<String,String> = [:]

Thoughts?

Opinion

Swift Hate

I’m seeing a surprising amount of vitriol aimed at Swift, Apple’s new programming language for iOS and Mac development. I understand that there can be reasoned debate around the features (or lack thereof), syntax and even the necessity of it but there can be little doubt about the outcome: if you want to consider yourself an iOS developer, it’s a language that you will need to learn.

The only variable I can think of is when you learn it.

I think it’s perfectly reasonable to delay learning it as you have code to deliver now and because Swift is, well, very beta currently.

But asking what the point of Swift is not constructive. Asking what problems can be solved exclusively by Swift makes no sense at all you can do almost anything in most programming languages. Just because Intercal is Turing complete doesn’t mean that you’d want to use it for any real work. What varies between languages is what’s easy and what’s hard.

Objective-C undoubtedly makes some things easier than Swift. It’s a more dynamic language and its C foundations open up a lot of low-level optimisations that probably are not there in higher level languages.

But that same flexibility comes with a price: segmentation faults and memory leaks; pointers; easy-to-get-wrong switch statement; a lack of bounds checking. It also inherits a lot of ambiguity from original C language specification which makes certain automatic optimisations impossible.

How many applications require low-level optimisations more than safety? (And that’s ignoring that the biggest optimisations are usually found in designing a better algorithm or architecture.) How often is it better to have five lines of code instead of one? Every line is a liability, something that can go wrong, something that needs to be understood, tested and maintained.

Whatever its failings, it’s already clear that Swift is more concise and safer than Objective C.

There are absolutely applications where Objective C, C or C++ would be a better choice than Swift. It’s the old 80-20 rule applied to a programming language. And, for those resistant to learning a new language, the 80% is not on “your” side.

Right now, some of this requires a bit of a leap of faith. Swift clearly isn’t finished. You can either learn it now and potentially have some say on what the “final” version looks like, or you can learn it afterwards and just have to accept what’s there. But, either way, you’ll probably using it next year. Get used to it.

Programming

Learning Swift

Swift is a new programming language designed by Apple for development on OS X and iOS. I thought that I should try to learn it a little so I decided to convert a non-trivial collection of classes from one of my apps (www.cut) into Swift. I always find it better to work on a real project rather than just to play around with things aimlessly. Also, by re-working an old project, I knew that all the problems I would find would be language related rather than anything to do with the architecture.

The classes are also data related rather than being UI, so it is mostly a test of the language itself rather than how it interfaces with Objective C.

First impressions are good. Swift is mostly nice and consistent, which although sounding like damning with faint praise, is actually a compliment. I read a little of the language guide and dove straight in. A lot of the attempts to get the following right were me just typing stuff, guessing the syntax rather than looking it up.

Quite by accident I think my code sample inadvertently shows an area of strength for Objective-C and weakness for Swift.

The idea of the code is that it reads a Plist, instantiates a class based on that configuration and fills in a number of properties.

The first half of the code looks like this:

        NSError* error = nil;
        NSString *plistPath = [[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:@"XXX" ofType:@"plist"];
        NSData *plistXML = [[NSFileManager defaultManager] contentsAtPath:plistPath];
        NSDictionary *temp = (NSDictionary *)[NSPropertyListSerialization propertyListWithData:plistXML
                                                                                       options:NSPropertyListMutableContainersAndLeaves
                                                                                        format:NULL
                                                                                         error:&error];
        NSArray* values = [temp objectForKey:@"Entries"];

This was pretty straight forward to convert into Swift, though the type system gave me issues:

    let plistPath =  NSBundle.mainBundle().pathForResource("XXX", ofType: "plist")
    let plistXML = NSFileManager.defaultManager().contentsAtPath(plistPath)

    var error:NSError? = nil
    var format:CMutablePointer<NSPropertyListFormat>? = nil
    let immutable:NSPropertyListReadOptions = 0
    var pList = NSPropertyListSerialization.propertyListWithData(plistXML,
        options:NSPropertyListReadOptions(NSPropertyListMutabilityOptions.Immutable.toRaw()),
        format:format!,
        error: &error) as NSDictionary

Getting the options property seems very clumsy; I’m sure that there must be a better way of doing it.

I had a real problem with the in/out parameters format and error. Not only was the documentation confusing but the Swift Playground kept crashing making it difficult to distinguish between what I was doing wrong and where the compiler itself was messing up. It’s also a bit odd that, though both are in/out parameters, that they both need different methods to extract the values.

(To be fair, this is a beta and it is the first version of a whole language and compiler. I mention the crashes not because they’re unexpected or even especially bad, just as an honest description of the difficulty I had.)

The next section, using the data in the plist, was much more problematic. The code looks like this, but I’ve trimmed a lot so what we have here isn’t terribly useful now!

        proxy = nil;
        for (NSDictionary* i in values) {
            if ([thing isEqualToString:[i objectForKey:@"Class"]]) {
                dynamicClass = NSClassFromString([i objectForKey:@"BaseClass"]);
                proxy = [[dynamicClass alloc] init];
            }
        }

I didn’t do the straight conversion. A few more years of Cocoa programming allowed me to notice an optimisation:

    let valueList = values.filteredArrayUsingPredicate(NSPredicate(format: "Class = %@", value))
    let valueData = valueList[0] as NSDictionary

This same approach would work in Objective-C.

Next I tried:

  let dynamicClass = NSClassFromString(valueData["BaseClass"])
  let proxy = dynamicClass()

The first line works as expected. The second line doesn’t compile.

Is there anything else that we can do with dynamicClass? Let’s see. It’s an AnyClass which is a type alias for AnyObject.Type. Which doesn’t really help.

I tried casting it to a base class but no matter what I tried I couldn’t alloc/init it (in Objective C terms).

Josh Smith figured out how to do it by creating a factory class in Objective-C.

I tried (and failed) to get it to work by calling some of the Objective-C runtime directly:

var bytes:Byte[] = [0,0,0,0]
let b = objc_constructInstance(a, &bytes)

But the second line doesn’t work when using ARC. (To be fair, Xcode struck through the definition so I didn’t have much confidence that it would work!)

So that leaves Josh’s call out to Objective-C to be the best method that I’m aware of.

In the end I just used a switch statement to select between the relatively limited number of options that I had to choose between. Not as clever, but maybe that’s a good thing?