[swift-evolution] [Draft] Mixins

[Wallacy]

You are not alone, discursions like start a long time ago on Swift 1.1 on
the old forum.

I also have here on my desktop some proposals involving storage properties
in protocols.

The idea appears to be simple, but is hard to get a good design.

Properties on Default Protocol Implementations
<http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.swift.evolution/2996>

Some quotes that can help here:

-- Douglas Gregor  -- "
Default implementations of functions don’t require per-instance state,
while adding a stored property via a protocol extension does. Let’s step
back to a simpler problem: stored properties in (non-protocol) extensions.

In the existing language, one can only introduce stored properties in the
primary definition of the type. That’s because, when we create an instance
of that type, we need to know how much storage to allocate for that
instance. So, right now, we don’t even allow, e.g.,

struct MyStruct { }
extension MyStruct { var storage: Int = 0 } // error: extensions may not
contain stored properties

class MyClass { }
extension MyClass { var storage: Int = 0 } // error: extensions may not
contain stored properties

because, in the worst case, we don’t know about the storage required for
the “storage” property until after we’ve allocated some instances of
MyStruct or MyClass, and we can’t simply go back and resize those instances
when we learn about the “storage” property. The “worst case” here could
come about with shared libraries: put the MyStruct/MyClass primary
definitions into an app, then put the extensions into a separate shared
library. The app creates some MyStruct and MyClass instances, then loads
the shared library, and now we have a problem: those instances have no
storage for “storage.”

We could relax the requirement to allow extensions in the same module as
the primary definition of that type to introduce stored properties, because
they’re compiled along with the primary type definition anyway. This
doesn’t solve out-of-module extensions, of course.

We could embed a pointer into each instance that points off to the stored
properties for that instance. The pointer would refer to some
lazily-allocated memory on the heap with that extra storage. However, this
would either bloat every data structure by a pointer (including “Int”!) or
have to be opt-in, neither of which are great. I don’t think there is any
reasonable implementation for out-of-module stored properties in extensions
of value types (struct/enum).

For classes, where we have object identity, we could have a side table
containing the stored properties (keyed on the object’s address). This is
how Objective-C’s associated objects work, and it’s a reasonable module for
out-of-module stored properties in extensions of classes.

Getting back to stored properties in protocol extensions, the general
feature isn’t implementable without having some mechanism for out-of-module
stored properties in extensions of structs and enums, so you can limit it
in a few ways:

* Only allow them on class-bound protocols, where there is a reasonable
implementation model

* Allow them as default implementations within a protocol (not an extension
of a protocol!); a type can conform to that protocol either by providing
its own implementation of that property or somewhere where it is reasonable
for the default implementation to inject a stored property into that
context (e.g., on the primary type, within the same module as the primary
type, or on a class).

Either handles the example brought up in the discussion of abstract base
classes.

- Doug
"

-- Chris Lattner  -- "

Hi Doug,

Have you considered this similar-but-different approach?

- Allow extensions on classes (only) within the same module/resilience
domain as the class to add stored
properties. This would keep them inline in the instance.
- Allow protocols to have stored property declarations, introducing a
new “protocol with storage”
(PwS) concept.
- Classes can directly conform to a PwS in its definition, or within
an extension inside the same
module/resilience domain.

Just this would give many of the benefits of a full mix-in programming
model.  People could define these
protocols, and their local implementation of the type can benefit from
them.  It doesn’t support
retroactive mixin’ing, but that is probably a good thing.  I’m
assuming that we don’t want to allow
adding state to structs within a resilience domain, just because I
don’t think that is actually a good
thing to add to the programming model (other reasonable people will
surely disagree).

This base model could then be extended:
- Structs could conform to a PwS in their definition, but not an
extension.  We could optionally require the
struct to redeclare the properties to improve readability of the
struct, but it wouldn’t be required
from an implementation perspective.
- Classes could conform to a PwS across resilience boundaries, but
wouldn’t get the state: they’d have
to implement the storage requirement with a computed property.
- We could introduce an “associated objects” property behavior that
makes providing the computed
property very straight-forward, using the out of band implementation
approach of ObjC.

The advantages of this approach I see are:

1) implementable, always a bonus.
2) keeps predictable performance.  You don’t get out “associated
objects” overhead unexpectedly.
All state is always stored inline.
3) retroactive mixins are possible, but explicit.

The primary downside of this approach is that it introduces yet
another weird protocol variant with
limitations and behaviors, making the model more complicated.

-Chris

"

Some of the challenges I'm having to write my proposal is to find a model
that does not make the language much complex and still bring a direct
benefit.

Em sáb, 27 de fev de 2016 às 06:59, Антон Жилин <swift-evolution at swift.org>
escreveu:

> Some people opposed to Abstract Classes proposal (including myself) have
> said that mixins could solve the problem better.
> So I prepaired a proposal draft to add stored properties to protocols.
> Here it is:
> https://gist.github.com/Anton3/f0550922c1be0fc5447c
>
> P.S. I added a `mixin` keyword in the beginning, but we can opt to just
> extend protocols, which I mention in "alternatives".
> _______________________________________________
> swift-evolution mailing list
> swift-evolution at swift.org
> https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution
>
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