[swift-evolution] [Proposal] Make optional protocol methods first class citizens

[Yuval Tal]

Hello,

I'm aware of all the protocol/extension or multiple protocol options. I
think that for the sake of code readability and the ability to easily
create components, it is extremely useful. For example, if I want to create
a class that has a delegate, it is extremely useful for the caller to
easily know what is required to be implemented and what is optional. Having
multiple protocols is probably not a great idea, and using the protocol
extension method makes it non-intuitive for the caller to clearly
understand what is optional. Note that I'm not suggesting a new language
constructs, just to ease the requirement on existing one, that honestly, I
found extremely clear and making interfaces much more obvious.

-Yuval

On Wed, Mar 30, 2016 at 10:18 AM, Haravikk <swift-evolution at haravikk.me>
wrote:

> I’m not sure, why not just define an additional protocol with the optional
> method(s) you’d like to add? The whole point of protocols is to guarantee
> access to some baseline capability, so I’m not sure that optional
> capabilities are well covered except by adding new protocols that extend
> each other.
>
> Objective-C conversion has the ability because Objective-C is unusual by
> comparison thanks to its ability to have “method calls” (messages) with no
> actual destination. I think it’s good for Swift to be more structured and
> strict than that.
>
> > On 30 Mar 2016, at 15:08, Yuval Tal via swift-evolution <
> swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
> >
> > Hi,
> >
> > I find that optional protocol methods to be very useful. However, there
> is a caveat -- it needs to be mapped to @objc. This puts a set of
> limitations, such as: structures cannot be used as parameters as it does
> not map to objective-c. What do you think about removing the requirement of
> using @objc and allow to create optional methods without these limitations?
> >
> > Thank you,
> >
> > -Yuval
>
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