Welcome. This is Ray Fix's personal blog. A stream of consciousness series of ramblings intended for a future self.
One of the features in Swift 6.2 is the ability to turn on strict memory safety checking. It makes it easy to audit unsafe calls by requiring you to add the new unsafe keyword to any expression that calls something @unsafe or uses an unsafe parameter. This can be done in Xcode 26 by setting “Strict Memory Safety” to “Yes” or, in the case of a Swift package, turning the feature on.
A Swift enumeration case lets you clearly spell out a mode of operation in the call site of a function. The downside is that by their nature they are “closed” and can’t be extended from outside the library they are declared. Once you define then, that’s it, they can’t be extended without another release. Recent additions to Swift 5.5 give you more tools fore creating API that is both ergonomic and…
One of the great things about the R statistical programming languages is it’s ability to operate on vectors of values. I got to thinking, wouldn’t it to be great to have this capability in Swift? Well, Swift is nice that way. Swift gives you a lot of flexibility to morph the language.
Notes reading the async/concurrency proposals to be introduced in Swift 5.5. Before you can play chess well, you must first learn the rules of chess.
Apple’s CoreData is a great choice for a data model on iOS and with SwiftUI. Under the hood it uses SQLite to handle lots of data that can’t fit into memory all at once. I have always wondered about using SQLite directly. It would be a little messy because SQLite is a C library and it would force you to use the unsafe APIs that you would certainly want to wrap. It turns out that you can pretty…
Swift 5.4 is now released and includes language improvements and tooling improvements. Paul Hudson, as usual, has a great summary of what is new hosted at https://www.whatsnewinswift.com.
It’s easy to apply the Swift Argument Parser in the last post to a SwiftUI app. This capability can be helpful in testing by allowing you to bootstrap data into your app. In this post, you will take a minimal SwiftUI app and add argument parsing to it. Here is the app greeting that shows a greeting message to the user.
Command-line interfaces (CLIs) provide a robust, textual way to communicate with your programs. Swift, as a general-purpose computing platform, lets you build these kinds of tools efficiently and elegantly. In this post, you’ll have a look at the Swift package Argument Parser, which handles all the boilerplate of creating a full-featured, command-line interface.