This Week in Swift  October 27th 2014

Swift Failable Initializers

This is a great reminder that even though failable initializers are a thing now, they should be used very sparingly: "failable initializers misplace responsibilities in your architecture, or at least encourage you to do so. Specifically, they misplace the point of failure. An initializer should construct an instance. It should be as simple as possible. It should provide appropriate default values when feasible. It should not be processing or parsing data, as those responsibilities are for functions or instance methods. And most importantly, it should succeed. Of course, there will be exceptions but they should be few."

Swift Optimisation Again

Here are some of the golden tips from @jl_hfl's slides at the Swift London meetup last week. Check out the full slides for more!

• Avoid non-local mutable state (compiler can’t optimise)
• Don’t be afraid to copy/pass data by argument - the compiler can optimise it out out. Copies happen if needed and are fast
• Pure functions are best - run in parallel, no global state to interfere with optimisation
• Structs are fast - raw memory, often on stack
• Use constants (declared with let)
• Consider different algorithms - often the biggest win

Drawing with Text

Here are some fun code katas for improving your Swift skills. I bet you can come up with better solutions than the ones provided in this blog post! Hint: this looks like some fun practice for functional programming.

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