[swift-evolution] Get a list of Concrete Implementers for Protocols

[Jonathan Hull]

Hi Evolution,

We talked a while back about being able to get a list of all concrete implementations for a protocol (i.e. all the types that adhere to it).  Is this still being planned?

There are a couple of big use-cases for this:

• The first is for plug-ins and other things that require registration. A protocol can provide a way for them to be auto-registered by calling a static method from the protocol on each of them.

• The second is that you can build robust + extensible factories. 


I definitely have use for this right now.  I am currently writing a UI generator that auto-generates functioning UI based on a given set of criteria/data.  Right now, I have to manually register each partial-template (of which there will eventually be several thousand) with the factory by hand, which is an error-prone process. It is one of those things that was doable in ObjC pretty easily, but I still haven’t figured out how to do it in Swift.

Thanks,
Jon