[swift-evolution] Enhanced existential types proposal discussion

Russ Bishop xenadu at gmail.com
Sun May 22 17:05:52 CDT 2016


> On May 17, 2016, at 1:55 PM, Joe Groff via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
> 
> I agree with this. If we're certain we should reskin protocol<> as Any<>, we should frontload that change—in addition to affecting source code, it'd also influence the runtime behavior of type printing/parsing, which can't be statically migrated in the future. I think any discussion of extending existentials has to be considered out of scope for Swift 3, though, so the Any rename deserves its own proposal.
> 
> -Joe


Its really unfortunate that the generics work is probably going to be deferred. When you really dive in to protocol-oriented programming and designing frameworks to be native Swift (taking advantage of Swift features) the existential problem comes up a lot and leads to sub-optimal designs, abandonment of type safety, or gobs of boilerplate.  


Russ



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