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Feb 26, 2017
There's an industry-wide push for protocol-oriented programming where shared interfaces, behaviors and substitutability are provided through protocols rather than subclasses. In this article though, I'll look at a case where I chose to use a subclass, instead of a protocol, to take advantage of some specific differences between classes and protocols.
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Jan 30, 2017
I look at what's required to use the Swift Package Manager to transparently fetch dependencies during an Xcode build phase.
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Jan 12, 2017
A light hearted look back at my time programming in the 1990s as I try to get an old Minesweeper implementation of mine from 1999, written in C++ using PowerPlant for Mac OS 8, compiling in Xcode 8 and running on macOS Sierra.
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Dec 31, 2016
Just a little helper class that I use to round off the rough edges when dealing with Cocoa's key-value observing.
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Dec 27, 2016
A discussion about reference counted lifetimes in Swift; how the lifetime of scope variables differs from C++ and Objective-C, how releases are reordered by the Swift compiler and the conventional use of withExtendedLifetime versus my unconventional usage.
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Nov 28, 2016
I'll explain why I consider reactive programming to be one of the most important design patterns for application programming by looking at three scenarios that are common in application development, yet are a drain on development time, lead to frequent bugs and make design and refactoring hard. I'll show how reactive programming addresses the verbosity, eliminates the unsafety and restructures the code to aid maintainability.
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Nov 28, 2016
In this article, I'm presenting CwlSignal. It is the latest Swift iteration of a library that I've been using for reactive programming for the last few years. CwlSignal is simple, fast, threadsafe and full-featured while offering a number of unique abilities.
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Oct 25, 2016
Testing that actions are scheduled correctly over time is a pain. I'll show a way to test events scheduled over time, threads and other execution contexts with a "Debug Context Coordinator" that functions as a basic task scheduler but operates over a simulated version of time so that testing of invocation times and task interaction can be precise and free from changes due to host activity.
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Oct 14, 2016
I take a look at what's involved in specifying the 'execution context' in which a function should be invoked. It's a complicated task due to how broad the term 'execution context' can be, as well as the fact that both function caller and function callee may have conflicting desires for how a function should be invoked.
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Sep 22, 2016
I present an implementation of a a double-ended queue type (deque) in Swift and look at what is required to implement copy-on-write in an optimized way so that this double-ended queue is faster than Array when used as a first-in-first-out (FIFO) queue.
