Summary

Generic types can be incredibly useful and they are also the basis of the Swift standard collection types (array and dictionary); however, as mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, we have to be careful to use them correctly.

We have seen a couple of examples in this chapter that show how generics can make our lives easier. The swapGeneric() function that was shown at the beginning of the chapter is a good use of a generic function because it allows us to swap two values of any type we choose.

The generic list type is also a good example of how to make custom collection types that can be used to hold any type. How we implemented the generic list type in this chapter is similar to how Swift implements the array and dictionary with generics.