My original article — “Best Practices for Building Swift Classes” — was published on appcoda.com.
In this tutorial, I’m going to show you some best practices that will help you design and implement classes (reference types) and then safely leverage reference semantics in Swift. Protocol-oriented programming (POP) and value semantics are all the rage now, but a promising new technology doesn’t mean you should throw all your classes away. Why not add some simple constructs to your classes like copy initializers, default initializers, designated initializers, failable initializers, deinitializers, and conformance to the Equatable protocol? To get real about my sample code, I’ll adopt these constructs in some classes and show you my best practices working in real life for drawing in your iOS app interfaces.
I’ll walk through the process of creating several protocols, creating classes that adopt those protocols, implement inheritance in these classes, and use instances of the classes (objects), all to illustrate my best practices — and to show some of the extra steps you may have to go through when working with classes.
Continue reading “Some best practices for designing and coding Swift classes”
Notice that Swift almost seems to frown on making a copy of a reference type, i.e., a copy of an instance of a class, or, as some would rather put it, getting a copy of an object. I’m not talking about getting another reference to a class, I’m talking about getting an entire, separate copy of a class instance. This frowning on class copying is not an accident. Swift’s language architects want the syntax and semantics of the language to be crystal clear. They want developers to be confident that 