[swift-users] Swift/Obj C interoperability: 'Obj C only' functions

[Andrew Hill2]

Hi,

I’ve been looking at making some changes to the ResearchKit library. This is mainly written in Objective C, with small portions of Swift.

The Pull request I’ve generated leveraged Swift generics to make handling predicates easier from Swift.


The existing functions had to utilise different functions for each type of object.

The Swift function of course uses generics and simplifies that down to a single function.

To maintain Objective C compatibility, we still need to provide the original functions for Obj C programmers. We don’t want to re-implement the functions twice in two different ways, and we want Obj C programmers to use one set of functions, and Swift programmers to only use the other one.


It’s easy enough to expose a function from Swift to Objective C code of course.

However, is there a way to expose a function in a Swift file which is ONLY available externally to Objective C files and not to other Swift ones? (or at least warns if called from Swift or something like that)? Basically an @objconly ?

The case described above is fairly trivial, but there are more complicated areas where this would have a more marked effect. It would be nice not to have Swift ResearchKit developers exposed to a load of API functions they don’t need which are there only to support Obj C.

Best wishes,

Andrew---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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