[swift-evolution] Proposal for generic protocols

[Tal Atlas]

Thanks for the great info. I made this because I didn't see anything on the
current plan and I really hope that whatever comes out has the power and
ease of the proposal.

Thanks again for the great responses.

On Thu, Dec 3, 2015 at 5:43 PM Joe Groff <jgroff at apple.com> wrote:

>
> On Dec 3, 2015, at 2:12 PM, Tal Atlas <me at tal.by> wrote:
>
> With the awesome expansion of protocol oriented programming that swift has
> allowed, the lack of generic protocols has felt noticeably lacking and
> painful in some cases. I made an in depth proposal here:
> https://github.com/tal/swift-evolution/blob/tal/generic-protocol-proposal/proposals/NNNN-add-generic-protocols.md
>
> But the tl;dr is this:
>
> protocol Validator<TypeToValidate> {
>   var value: TypeToValidate { get set }
>   var valueIfValid: TypeToValidate? { get }
> }
>
> struct FooStringValidator: Validator<String> {
>   //... implementation
> }
>
> let stringValidator: Validator<String>
>
>
> The lack of protocol type erasure when associated types are involved is
> definitely a big problem, and one we'd like to address. However, I don't
> think moving wholesale to modeling associated types this way is feasible.
> Many of the standard library protocols have a lot of associated types.
> 'CollectionType' for instance has its 'Index' type while also inheriting a
> 'Generator' from SequenceType, and neither of these is what you typically
> want to parameterize a collection on—you'd want 'CollectionType<Int>'
> ideally to refer to a collection whose *Element* is Int without having to
> fully specify the generator and index if you don't care about them. Swift's
> protocols also support type system features that make some erased protocol
> types not actual models of their own protocols; `Equatable` is notorious
> for this, since a type being `Equatable` to its own values does not mean it
> can be equated to arbitrary other types; `1 == "1"` is nonsense for
> instance. We have a number of issues that need to be considered here; don't
> worry, we are considering them!
>
> -Joe
>
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