joy of swift

Sep. 27, 2016 160 words 1 min

When I wrote this post back in April, I didn’t know that there was so much more to enjoy when coding in Swift.

I needed some kind of caching in an app and faked it at first by using a dictionary with some fabricated entries
private var cache = [URL:URL?]()
The fun began after implementing the actual cache, adding subscript get/set functions and dropping in the actual cache simply by replacing the dictionary with
private var cache = MyCacheImplementation().
The syntax for accessing the cache didn’t change at all and the new implementation can still be accessed using the subscript operator [] like this
if let url = cache["http:\\server\file.mp3"]{...

Very nice!

To some, this might be merely syntactic sugar and one could argue that writing a stub for the cache first or using dependency injection would be a better implementation for the situation. True, but not the point. I like the simplicity of the resulting code at the call site.