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
2. What makes Swift Swift?
3. Kaitlin Mahar Drivers Engineer @ MongoDB @k__mahar @kmahar
4. What is a MongoDB driver? app driver MongoDB … !! BSON 00101...
5. Why build a Swift driver? MongoDB Mobile!
6. What is Swift, anyway?
7. What is Swift? • released in 2014, open-sourced in 2015 • up to version 4.1.2
8. Why did Apple create Swift? “Objective-C without the C”
9. So why do people still use Objective-C? young language small community breaking changes
10. So why should I use Swift?
11. Swift makes working with C libraries easy.
12. The Swift driver wraps the C driver. Swift app MongoDB Swift driver C driver
13. Descriptive Pointer Types OpaquePointer UnsafePointer<T> UnsafeMutablePointer<T> UnsafeBufferPointer<T> UnsafeMutableBufferPointer<T> UnsafeRawPointer UnsafeMutableRawPointer UnsafeRawBufferPointer UnsafeMutableRawBufferPointer Opaque (or not) <T> or Raw Mutable (or not) Buffer (or not)
14. Using OpaquePointers in MongoSwift
15. Using UnsafePointers in MongoSwift
16. Challenges of wrapping C
17. Swift has a powerful type system.
18. Built-in Optional Support
19. What is an optional?
20. What is an optional? A typed value that is optionally set
21. Using Optionals in MongoSwift
22. Using Optionals in MongoSwift
23. Using Optionals in MongoSwift
24. Extensions
25. Extensions Add new functionality to existing types
26. Extensions Add new functionality to existing types
27. Extensions Add new functionality to existing types
28. Protocols
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
30. ExpressibleByDictionaryLiteral
31. ExpressibleByDictionaryLiteral
32. ExpressibleByDictionaryLiteral
33. How to represent BSON values? Double String Document Array Binary ObjectId Boolean Date Regex CodeWithScope Int32 Timestamp Int64 Decimal128 MinKey MaxKey
34. How to represent BSON values? Double String Document Array Binary ObjectId Boolean Date Regex CodeWithScope Int32 Timestamp Int64 Decimal128 MinKey MaxKey
35. Custom protocols
36. Custom types can conform to protocols
37. Native types can be extended to conform to protocols
38. Protocols can be used as types
39. Generics
40. Generics
41. Generics
42. Generics With Constraints
43. Using Generics in MongoSwift
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?)
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!
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
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)