[swift-evolution] [Pitch] Bridging nil to Objective-C Primitives

[Jeff Kelley]

Hi all,

I don’t have a formal proposal written up yet, but in my continued quest to
make better-annotated Objective-C code, I had an idea for bridging nil with
primitives. Since in Objective-C we often use constant values to represent
invalid values or nil, the most obvious being NSNotFound, could we use that
as a shorthand for nil? Something like this for NSArray:

- (NSUInteger NS_SWIFT_NIL(NSNotFound))indexOfObject:(ObjectType)anObject;

This is a little verbose, so it could also work with a typedef:

typedef NSUInteger NS_SWIFT_NIL(NSNotFound) NSArrayIndex;
- (NSArrayIndex)indexOfObject:(ObjectType)anObject;

This would change the existing Swift interface to return an Int? instead of
an Int. I see this as working both ways—converting these values to nil when
returning from Objective-C to Swift, and sending these values instead of nil
when Swift calls into Objective-C code.

Is this worth writing up a proposal for? Is another, better method already
in someone’s mind?


Jeff Kelley

SlaunchaMan at gmail.com | @SlaunchaMan <https://twitter.com/SlaunchaMan> |
jeffkelley.org
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