[swift-dev] What can you change in a non-exhaustive enum?

[Jordan Rose]

So, an update! This came up while I was talking to members of the core team, and ChrisL felt very strongly that restricting reordering of enum elements was a no-go, since it would be the only part of the language that worked this way (even if it only mattered for binary frameworks). Ted also rightly pointed out that any such language-level restriction would have to be reviewed by the core team.

So where does that leave us?

- The naive implementation is to turn a switch into an if-else chain, unfortunately requiring one function call per case to match.

- A slightly more complex solution keeps a single 'getMyOpaqueEnumTag' entry point (see original email), but exposes symbols for every tag. The values of the symbols would be kept in alphabetical order, which allows the generated code to do a binary search over the cases they care about. This still means N symbols, but a switch that involves several of them doesn't necessarily have to take linear time.

- Joe Groff came up with this idea that also involves sorted symbols:

switch indexForMyOpaqueEnumTag(&myOpaqueEnum, [MyOpaqueEnum.intCase, MyOpaqueEnum.stringCase]) {
case 0:
  var payload: Int
  getMyOpaqueEnumPayload(&myOpaqueEnum, MyOpaqueEnum.intCase, &payload)
  doSomething(payload)
case 1:
  var payload: String
  getMyOpaqueEnumPayload(&myOpaqueEnum, MyOpaqueEnum.stringCase, &payload)
  doSomethingElse(payload)
default:
  print("unknown case")
}

In this example, the actual tag values for 'intCase' and 'stringCase' might not be 0 and 1, but 'indexForMyOpaqueEnumTag' can do the binary search to find out which enum we're asking for. Like the previous solution, you only have to check the cases you care about, but this time the binary search is in the callee, rather than the client.

- Use availability ordering, plus some kind of explicit annotation for when multiple cases are added within the same release. (In this thread people have suggested dates, ad-hoc sub-version numbers, and plain integer values.)

I appreciate everyone's creativity with solving the availability ordering problem, but I don't want to tie us to a checker that will tell you if you screw up or a history scraper that will implicitly add the right annotations. (I don't think those are bad ideas, but they're a whole extra pile of work on top of the main implementation!) That leaves explicit annotations of some kind, and that leaves us in a worse place than Objective-C. Which is permitted, but not desirable.

 At this point in time I think the second option is the best one we have: it's relatively simple to implement, it supports everything Objective-C does, and it doesn't make the availability model even more complicated. It is going to be less efficient than actually knowing the case numbers at compile time, though. Still, as Slava's pointed out, we can still change this after we go ABI-stable; doing something more efficient will just be limited based on deployment target.

Jordan

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