Default Protocol Implementation Inheritance Behaviour - The current situation and what/if anything should be done about it

[sjavora (Šimon Javora)]

Some related discussions (there is a lot more, though):

Require use of override keyword to override dynamically dispatched methods defined in a protocol with a default implementation

Dipping my toes in the water, so to speak, with a suggestion that came to mind. Not an expert by any means, so hopefully this isn't too laughably off the mark. As background, I work in the biomedical sciences; with few exceptions, those of us who write code are non-experts who learn as we go along. What's been attractive about Swift is that it's been designed with approachability in mind for beginning coders and those with a rudimentary understanding of languages in the C family. Difficult…

Overriding protocol default implementation

As we all know, if you override the default implementation of a protocol, if you call the method from the protocol reference, the protocol’s default implementation will be called, not the override of that method. For example:     protocol Fooable {         // this is intentionally blank     }     extension Fooable {         func foo() {             print("foo")         }     }     class FooBar: Fooable {         func foo() {             print("foobar")         }     }     func perf…

[Pitch] Requiring proactive overrides for default protocol implementations.

From the Swift Programming Language: Methods on a subclass that override the superclass’s implementation are marked with override—overriding a method by accident, without override, is detected by the compiler as an error. The compiler also detects methods with override that don’t actually override any method in the superclass. I would like to extend this cautious approach to protocols, forcing the developer to deliberately override an implementation that’s inherited from a protocol extension. T…