Swift Generics Improvements

Several days ago Joe Groff posted Improving the UI of generics on the Swift forums.

This proposal felt important — but it was, I hate to admit, really slow going for me to figure it out. For one thing, I had no idea what an “existential” is.

This is no criticism: this stuff, like a scientific paper, has to be written precisely and with agreed-upon terminology. It’s just that I don’t know all the terminology.

So, on another discussion forum, some of my friends were talking about it, and two people really helped with everyone’s understanding of the proposal: Greg Titus and Tim Ekl.

And then Tim went on to write a blog post which explains all of this in a way that regular Swift users — like me! — can understand.

Go read it! Swift Generics Evolution by Tim Ekl.

I’ve used generics a little, but I didn’t like what it did to the readability of my code. Now that I understand this new proposal, I like it. Very much.