A Swift Introduction to Swift

Swift has been among StackOverflow’s “most loved” languages every year since its 2014 release. With examples from the MongoDB Swift driver, this talk will highlight unique, powerful features of Swift, and discuss the challenges of writing good code in a young, flexible and rapidly changing language. Attendees will come away informed about some of the advantages and challenges of writing code in Swift. They will be better prepared to write idiomatic Swift of their own, and will have a deeper understanding of how a MongoDB driver works.

Transcript

1. A Swift Introduction to Swift
   Kaitlin Mahar
   

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2. What makes Swift Swift?
   

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3. Kaitlin Mahar
   Drivers Engineer @ MongoDB
   @k__mahar @kmahar
   

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4. What is a MongoDB driver?
   app driver MongoDB
   … !!
   BSON
   00101...
   

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5. Why build a Swift driver?
   MongoDB Mobile!
   

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6. What is Swift, anyway?
   

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7. What is Swift?
   • released in 2014, open-sourced in 2015
   • up to version 4.1.2
   

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8. Why did Apple create Swift?
   “Objective-C without the C”
   

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9. So why do people still use Objective-C?
   young language small community breaking changes
   

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10. So why should I use Swift?
    

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11. Swift makes working with
    C libraries easy.
    

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12. The Swift driver wraps the C driver.
    Swift
    app
    MongoDB
    Swift driver
    C driver
    

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13. Descriptive Pointer Types
    OpaquePointer
    UnsafePointer
    UnsafeMutablePointer
    UnsafeBufferPointer
    UnsafeMutableBufferPointer
    UnsafeRawPointer
    UnsafeMutableRawPointer
    UnsafeRawBufferPointer
    UnsafeMutableRawBufferPointer
    Opaque (or not)
    or Raw
    Mutable (or not)
    Buffer (or not)
    

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14. Using OpaquePointers in MongoSwift
    

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15. Using UnsafePointers in MongoSwift
    

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16. Challenges of wrapping C
    

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17. Swift has a powerful
    type system.
    

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18. Built-in Optional
    Support
    

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19. What is an optional?
    

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20. What is an optional?
    A typed value that is optionally set
    

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21. Using Optionals in MongoSwift
    

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22. Using Optionals in MongoSwift
    

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23. Using Optionals in MongoSwift
    

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24. Extensions
    

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25. Extensions
    Add new functionality to existing types
    

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26. Extensions
    Add new functionality to existing types
    

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27. Extensions
    Add new functionality to existing types
    

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28. Protocols
    

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29. Protocols
    • Similar to an interface in other languages -
    specify a required set of properties and methods
    • A type that implement those requirements
    conforms to the protocol
    • Classes, structs, and enums can all conform
    

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30. ExpressibleByDictionaryLiteral
    

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31. ExpressibleByDictionaryLiteral
    

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32. ExpressibleByDictionaryLiteral
    

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33. How to represent BSON values?
    Double String
    Document Array
    Binary ObjectId
    Boolean Date
    Regex CodeWithScope
    Int32 Timestamp
    Int64 Decimal128
    MinKey MaxKey
    

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34. How to represent BSON values?
    Double String
    Document Array
    Binary ObjectId
    Boolean Date
    Regex CodeWithScope
    Int32 Timestamp
    Int64 Decimal128
    MinKey MaxKey
    

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35. Custom protocols
    

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36. Custom types can conform to protocols
    

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37. Native types can be extended to conform to protocols
    

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38. Protocols can be used as types
    

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39. Generics
    

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40. Generics
    

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41. Generics
    

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42. Generics With Constraints
    

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43. Using Generics in MongoSwift
    

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44. Challenges of Swift’s type system
    • Lacking some desired features
    • Auto-generated ==, hashing (new in 4.1)
    • Conditional conformance (new in 4.1.. ish)
    • Default type parameters (someday?)
    

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45. In summary…
    • Swift is new and exciting!
    • Swift has a powerful type system: protocols,
    extensions, generics, optionals, and more.
    • Swift interoperates easily with C.
    • You should try writing Swift!
    

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46. What’s next for the driver?
    • 1.0 release
    • Full CRUD API
    • 4.0 features
    • replica sets, etc.
    • Integration with Swift web frameworks
    • Replace libbson usage with native Swift
    

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47. Want to learn more?
    Today:
    3:30-4pm MongoDB Mobile session in Gibson
    On your own:
    The Swift Programming Language (by Apple, free)
    objc.io videos and books
    Swift by Sundell (blog)
    

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