Limiting which frameworks or APIs can be used in source?

Using Swift
,
1

I'm wondering if there is a way to limit the usage of a list of frameworks or APIs.

Take for example a class-room with shared computers where students will use SPM to create CLI programs to learn programming (i.e. not iOS development).

Is there a way to limit the compiler or somehow (at compile or even runtime) say - this code should not be able to load CoreData or Foundation.URLSession :thinking:

Even if something that is not completely secure is OK, I'm just trying to to come up with valid ideas atm.

2

Could swizzling be used to prevent certain types from being created? Giving a runtime error if they are?

I guess there must also be a way to dynamically check whether a framework is loaded. Not certain how, though.

If the code doing this was made in objective c I guess you can even use the dynamic loading static method to have all of this swizzling run automatically just by linking to your framework?

3

Yes, swizzling is definitely something on my mind - it might a LOT of code though to swizzle every method in CoreData for example ... and that still doesn't take care of any global functions (if I remember right, didn't swizzle for many years).

4

Regarding Core Data, perhaps you could again use Objective-C to test if a class defined in Core Data is present at runtime using NSClassFromString?

if (NSClassFromString(@"SomeCoreDataClass") != nil) {
   fatalError("Please refrain from using Core Data")
}
5

That's a neat direction ... maybe I could couple this with the new SPM plugin system to inject runtime checks like this while compiling the binary.

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