Swift: Beta 5

The more things change

Russ Bishop
August 05, 2014

In the fast-moving world of Swift, I'm a day late and that might as well be a year. But I'm also a developer so I just can't help myself. Let's dive into the changes in Beta 5!

Optionals

  • As expected, the null coalescing operator was added ?? and lazily evaluates the right-hand side again as you'd . . .

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Swift: Wherein I do a horrible thing

Don't do this; code responsibly

Russ Bishop
July 29, 2014

Please don't do this. It's horrible, unsupported, and may crash your program.

That said, let's demangle a class name by calling an internal Swift library function.

@asmname("swift_demangleSimpleClass") 
func demangleSimpleClass(mangledName: ConstUnsafePointer<Int8>, 
 moduleName: UnsafePointer . . .

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Swift: Testing Privates

There's an awful joke in here somewhere

Russ Bishop
July 23, 2014

David Owens II writes about Swift access control and unit tests. He's currently adding his source files directly to the unit test target so the internal members are visible to the tests.

That's probably the best solution possible currently, but I'm filing a radar to add the equivalent of InternalsVisibleTo. In C#, that . . .

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Swift: Should We Make Optionals Clearer?

Who wants to live without extensions

Russ Bishop
July 23, 2014

Optionals are great, but there are some improvements that might make code clearer and more explicit. I also want to acknowledge that in some cases you don't actually care if the value is nil or not, you just want to provide an alternate value if it is; that's usually called the null coalescing operator, but Swift doesn't currently . . .

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Swift: Pointer Arithmetic

Abandon all hope of safety

Russ Bishop
July 22, 2014

Update: I originally did not make it clear but if Swift knows the type of the unsafe pointer then arithmetic will operate on sizeof(T) not on bytes! The same goes for alloc. So my example below with an UnsafePointer<Float32> will jump forward 25 * sizeof(Float32) bytes.

I've seen a lot of people wondering how to do raw . . .

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Swift: Notable Beta 4 Changes

Prayers answered, denied

Russ Bishop
July 21, 2014

Here are some of the more notable Swift changes as of Beta 4:

Access Control

The new access control keywords are available:

modifier
private can only be accessed from the source file where defined
internal can only be accessed from the current target where . . .

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Swift: Let's Query DNS

Interop in the real world

Russ Bishop
July 19, 2014

So far we've been going over some of the interop capabilities in Swift, but today I want to switch gears a bit and actually put this stuff to use. Along the way we'll discover some annoyances and take opportunities not available in Objective-C to remedy them.

Let's say we want to determine if a host is reachable. To do . . .

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