[swift-evolution] Enums and Source Compatibility

[Vladimir.S]

On 07.09.2017 7:33, Chris Lattner via swift-evolution wrote:
> 
>> On Sep 5, 2017, at 5:19 PM, Jordan Rose via swift-evolution 
>> <swift-evolution at swift.org <mailto:swift-evolution at swift.org>> wrote:
>>
>> I've taken everyone's feedback into consideration and written this up as a 
>> proposal: 
>> https://github.com/jrose-apple/swift-evolution/blob/non-exhaustive-enums/proposals/nnnn-non-exhaustive-enums.md. 
>> The next step is working on an implementation, but if people have further 
>> pre-review comments I'd be happy to hear them.
> 
> Hi Jordan,
> 
> I apologize in advance that I haven’t followed the back and forth on this thread, so 
> I’m sorry if these thoughts are duplicative:
> 
> I really would prefer to avoid introducing the notion of exhaustive/nonexhaustive 
> enums into Swift, and would much prefer that such a thing be limited to C (which 
> can’t express this concept already).
> 
> We’ve talked about enums many times across years, and it seems like the appropriate 
> model follows the generally understood resilience model.  Specifically, there should 
> be three different kinds of enums, and the kind should affect users outside their 
> module in different ways:
> 
> 1. private/fileprivate/internal enum: cases can be added freely.  All clients are in 
> the same module, so the enum is implicitly fragile, and all switches within the 
> current module may therefore be exhaustive.
> 
> 2. public enum (i.e., one that isn’t marked fragile): cases may be added freely. 
>   Within the module that defines the enum, switches may be exhaustive.  However, 
> because the enum is public and non-fragile, clients outside the current module must 
> be prepared for the enum to add additional cases in future revisions of the API, and 
> therefore they cannot exhaustively match the cases of the enum.

Just small note. As I understand, this is a source breaking suggestion, no?
I mean any client code for 'public enum' coming from another module, will have to add 
'default' case in 'switch'. So, the previously correct code will not compile. Or do 
you suggest to raise a warning only for the first time and raise an error in next 
version of Swift?

> 
> 3. fragile public enum: cases may not be added, because that would break the 
> fragility guarantee.  As such, clients within or outside of hte current module may 
> exhaustively match against the enum.
> 

I think 'fragile' word does not reflect what is guaranteed for this enum. The author 
guaranteed that this enum will not be changed, not "this enum can broke your code". 
Can't we use 'sealed'/'closed'/'fixed' here?

Vladimir.

> 
> This approach gives a very natural user model: app developers don’t have to care 
> about enum resilience until they mark an enum as public, and even then they only have 
> to care about it when/if they mark an enum as public.  This also builds on the notion 
> of fragility - something we need for other nominal types like structs and classes - 
> so it doesn’t introduce new language complexity.  Also such an approach is entirely 
> source compatible with Swift 3/4, which require defaults (this isn’t an accident, it 
> follows from the anticipated design).
> 
> This approach doesn’t address the problem of what to do with C though, because C 
> doesn’t have a reasonable notion of “extensible” vs “nonextensible” enum.  As such, 
> we definitely do need an attribute (or something) to add to Clang.  I think that your 
> proposal for defaulting to “extensible” and 
> using __attribute__((enum_extensibility(closed))) override this is perfectly sensible.
> 
> -Chris
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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