Cocoa with Love

Updating Cocoa with Love for Swift 3

Sep 14, 2016

This is a quick look at the changes I needed to make to bring Cocoa with Love up to date for Swift 3 and the latest iOS 10 and macOS Sierra.

Read more...
Values and errors, part 2: eight languages compared

Aug 23, 2016

A concrete look at the languages studied by the Swift developers when designing Swift's approach to error handling. By comparing these to Swift, I'll try to better understand what balance the Swift developers sought on the topics of feature complexity, syntactic efficiency, abstraction, information signalling and safety.

Read more...
Values and errors, part 1: 'Result' in Swift

Aug 21, 2016

In this article, I'll discuss the Result type in Swift as well as common variations in implementation and approach used for this data type. I'll also look at *why* the type was rejected for inclusion in the standard library and what effect that rejection is likely to have.

Read more...
Design patterns for safe timer usage

Jul 30, 2016

I look at usage patterns around timers including some problematic approaches that can make refactoring more difficult, cause strange bugs and otherwise create problems for maintainability.

Read more...
Exponential time complexity in the Swift type checker

Jul 12, 2016

One of the most annoying problems in Swift is when the compiler gives an 'Expression was too complex to be solved in a reasonable time' error. I look at why this error occurs, how to avoid it and talk about how this should be solved in a future compiler update.

Read more...
Parsing whitespace in an Xcode extension

Jun 25, 2016

Fun with a pushdown automaton (implemented as a single mighty switch statement) for parsing whitespace in Swift source files. The result is an Xcode 8 Source Editor Command extension for detecting and correcting whitespace issues in Swift files.

Read more...
Mutexes and closure capture in Swift

Jun 2, 2016

I'm going to talk about the absence of any threading or thread synchronization language features in Swift and the concurrency proposal for Swift's future. I'll also try to get a wrapper around different mutex machinery to perform optimally.

Read more...
Random number generators in Swift

May 19, 2016

I present a few random number generators in Swift and investigate their quality versus performance. I also look at performance implementations and see if I can make a C algorithm run as fast as Swift.

Read more...
Comparing Swift to C++ for parsing

May 1, 2016

I present an implementation of Swift's Demangle.cpp, rewritten in Swift and use the two versions (the original C++ and my Swift version) to compare the C++ and Swift for writing parsers.

Read more...
Presenting unanticipated errors to users

Apr 14, 2016

In my first truly 'Cocoa' article since restarting Cocoa with Love, I'll talk about presenting errors to the user. In particular, ensuring that errors we didn't expect or plan for are presented in a manner that allows error reporting by users and easier bug fixing.

Read more...