Pitch: Import Objective-C Constants as Enums

Evolution Pitches
2

FWIW, this has come up a number of times in discussions among Swift developers (although not, IIRC, on swift-evolution). Our current favored way to write this in (Objective-)C would be with a new typedef of NSString * that has some special attribute on it, e.g.,

  typedef NSString * NSErrorDomain __attribute__((enum(string)));

  FOUNDATION_EXPORT NSErrorDomain const NSCocoaErrorDomain;
  FOUNDATION_EXPORT NSErrorDomain const NSPOSIXErrorDomain;
  FOUNDATION_EXPORT NSErrorDomain const NSOSStatusErrorDomain;
  FOUNDATION_EXPORT NSErrorDomain const NSMachErrorDomain;

The typedef would import as a String-backed enum and all of the string constants declared with that typedef within the same module as the typedef would become cases of that enum. String constants declared with that typedef in a *different* module would become “static lets” within extensions of the String-backed enum.

Call that a +1 from me on your idea :)

  - Doug

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On Jan 17, 2016, at 7:13 PM, Jeff Kelley via swift-evolution <swift-evolution@swift.org> wrote:

A lot of Cocoa APIs have long lists of constant values, typically NSStrings. I’d like to pitch a way to import them as enums with associated types. I can write up a full proposal if people think this is a good idea, but here’s my thinking:

Let’s take the error domains in NSError.h for a quick example. These entries in the header:

FOUNDATION_EXPORT NSString *const NSCocoaErrorDomain;
FOUNDATION_EXPORT NSString *const NSPOSIXErrorDomain;
FOUNDATION_EXPORT NSString *const NSOSStatusErrorDomain;
FOUNDATION_EXPORT NSString *const NSMachErrorDomain;

turn into this in the Swift interface:

public let NSCocoaErrorDomain: String
public let NSPOSIXErrorDomain: String
public let NSOSStatusErrorDomain: String
public let NSMachErrorDomain: String

What I’m proposing is a way to import those as an enum instead. Similar to how we mark sections of Objective-C code with NS_ASSUME_NONNULL_BEGIN, we could mark it with something like NS_CASE_LIST_BEGIN. Then, this code:

NS_CASE_LIST_BEGIN;

FOUNDATION_EXPORT NSString *const NSCocoaErrorDomain;
FOUNDATION_EXPORT NSString *const NSPOSIXErrorDomain;
FOUNDATION_EXPORT NSString *const NSOSStatusErrorDomain;
FOUNDATION_EXPORT NSString *const NSMachErrorDomain;

NS_CASE_LIST_END;

would be imported as follows:

enum ErrorDomain : String {
    case Cocoa
    case POSIX
    case OSStatus
    case Mach
}

I can think of a lot of areas in Cocoa where these APIs could make things much more type-safe in Swift. Is this a good idea? Would people use this?