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Mastering Swift 3

You're reading from   Mastering Swift 3 Build incredible apps for iOS and OS X

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Product type Paperback
Published in Oct 2016
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781786466129
Length 392 pages
Edition 1st Edition
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Author (1):
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Jon Hoffman Jon Hoffman
Author Profile Icon Jon Hoffman
Jon Hoffman
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Table of Contents (18) Chapters Close

Preface 1. Taking the First Steps with Swift FREE CHAPTER 2. Learning About Variables, Constants, Strings, and Operators 3. Using Swift Collections and the Tuple Type 4. Control Flow and Functions 5. Classes and Structures 6. Using Protocols and Protocol Extensions 7. Protocol-Oriented Design 8. Writing Safer Code with Availability and Error Handling 9. Custom Subscripting 10. Using Optional Types 11. Working with Generics 12. Working with Closures 13. Using Mix and Match 14. Concurrency and Parallelism in Swift 15. Swift Formatting and Style Guide 16. Swifts Core Libraries 17. Adopting Design Patterns in Swift

When not to use generics


One of the things that we should watch out for while using generics is to avoid using them when we should be using protocols. This is, in my opinion, one of the most common misuses of generics in other languages. Let's take a look at an example so that we know what to avoid.

Let's say that we define a protocol called WidgetProtocol, which is as follows:

protocol WidgetProtocol { 
    //Code 
} 

Now, let's say that we want to create a custom type (or function) that will use various implementations of the WidgetProtocol protocol. I have seen a couple of instances where developers have used generics with a type constraint to create custom types as follows:

class MyClass<T: WidgetProtocol> { 
    var myProp: T? 
    func myFunc(myVar: T) { 
        //Code 
    } 
} 

While this is a perfectly valid use of generics, it is recommended that we avoid implementations like this. It is a lot cleaner and easier to read if we use...

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