Witness-Oriented Library Design

Apple’s eponymous WWDC talk on protocol-oriented programming:

At the heart of Swift’s design are two incredibly powerful ideas: protocol-oriented programming and first class value semantics. Each of these concepts benefit predictability, performance, and productivity, but together they can change the way we think about programming. Find out how you can apply these ideas to improve the code you write.

As of WWDC 2019, Apple no longer recommends that we “start with a protocol” when designing our APIs. A more balanced approach is discussed instead, including trying out concrete data types. Fast forward to 12:58 for the discussion.

Every programming language has a set of conventions that people come to expect. Learn about the patterns that are common to Swift API design, with examples from new APIs like SwiftUI, Combine, and RealityKit. Whether you’re developing an app as part of a team, or you’re publishing a library for others to use, find out how to use new features of Swift to ensure clarity and correct use of your APIs.

This talk by Alexis Gallagher shows why protocols with associated types are so complicated, and tries to understand why Swift chose to go with that design instead of other alternatives.

Facebook released a snapshot testing framework known as FBSnapshotTestCase back in 2013, and many in the iOS community adopted it. The library gives you an API to assert snapshots of UIView’s that will take a screenshot of your UI and compare it against a reference image in your repo. If a single pixel is off it will fail the test. Since then Facebook has stopped maintaining it and transfered ownership to Uber.

Stephen gave an overview of snapshot testing, its benefits, and how one may snapshot Swift data types, walking through a minimal implementation.

Haskell’s notion of protocols are called “type classes,” and the designers of Swift have often stated that Swift’s protocols took a lot of inspiration from Haskell. This means that Haskellers run into a lot of the same problems we do when writing abstractions with type classes. In this article Gabriella Gonzalez lays down the case for scrapping type classes and just using simple datatypes.

A Haskell article that demonstrates a pattern in the Haskell community, and why it might be an anti-pattern. In a nutshell, the pattern is for libraries to express their functionality with typeclasses (i.e. protocols) and provide Any* wrappers around the protocol for when you do not want to refer to a particular instance of that protocol. The alternative is to replace the typeclass with a simple concrete data type. Sound familiar?

Brandon gave a talk about “protocol witnesses” at the 2019 App Builders conference. The basics of scraping protocols is covered as well as some interesting examples of where this technique really shines when applied to snapshot testing and animations.

Protocol-oriented programming is strongly recommended in the Swift community, and Apple has given a lot of guidance on how to use it in your everyday code. However, there has not been a lot of attention on when it is not appropriate, and what to do in that case. We will explore this idea, and show that there is a completely straightforward and mechanical way to translate any protocol into a concrete datatype. Once you do this you can still write your code much like you would with protocols, but all of the complexity inherit in protocols go away. Even more amazing, a new type of composition appears that is difficult to see when dealing with only protocols. We will also demo a real life, open source library that was originally written in the protocol-oriented way, but after running into many problems with the protocols, it was rewritten entirely in this witness-oriented way. The outcome was really surprising, and really powerful.

We use the term pullback for the strange, unintuitive backwards composition that seems to show up often in programming. The term comes from a very precise concept in mathematics. Here is the Wikipedia entry:

In mathematics, a pullback is either of two different, but related processes: precomposition and fibre-product. Its “dual” is a pushforward.

A few months after releasing our episode on Contravariance we decided to rename this fundamental operation. The new name is more friendly, has a long history in mathematics, and provides some nice intuitions when dealing with such a counterintuitive idea.