Good afternoon,
In preparation for ABI stability, I’ve reviewed the API exposed by the standard library for providing customized “quick looks” in playgrounds. This is exposed as the PlaygroundQuickLook enum and the CustomPlaygroundQuickLookable protocol. The PlaygroundQuickLook has a handful of issues:
- It hard-codes the list of supported types in the standard library, meaning that PlaygroundLogger/IDEs cannot gain support for new types without standard library changes (including swift-evolution review)
- The cases of the enum are poorly typed: there are cases like `.view` and `.color` which take NS/UIView or NS/UIColor instances, respectively, but since they’re in the standard library, they have to be typed as taking `Any` instead
- The names of some of these enum cases do not seem to match Swift naming conventions)
To that end, I am proposing the following:
- Deprecate PlaygroundQuickLook and CustomPlaygroundQuickLookable in Swift 4.1 (including in the Swift 3 compatibility mode)
- Remove PlaygroundQuickLook and CustomPlaygroundQuickLookable in Swift 5 to avoid including them in the stable ABI (this affects the compatibility modes, too)
- Introduce a new protocol, CustomPlaygroundRepresentable, in the PlaygroundSupport library in Swift 4.1:
protocol CustomPlaygroundRepresentable {
/// Returns an alternate object or value which should stand in for the receiver in playground logging, or nil if the receiver’s default representation is preferred.
var playgroundRepresentation: Any? { get }
}
- Update the PlaygroundLogger library in Swift 4.1 to support both CustomPlaygroundRepresentable and PlaygroundQuickLook/CustomPlaygroundQuickLookable
- Provide a compatibility shim library which preserves PlaygroundQuickLook and CustomPlaygroundQuickLookable as deprecated in Swift 3/4 and unavailable in Swift 5, but only in playgrounds (including in the auxiliary source files stored inside a playground)
I’ve put a full proposal below. Please let me know what you think of this proposal; I’d like to get some feedback before taking this through the review process, but I’ll need to get that quickly so I can get it under review soon as this is targeted at Swift 4.1.
Thanks,
Connor
···
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Playground QuickLook API Revamp
Proposal: SE-NNNN <https://github.com/cwakamo/swift-evolution/blob/playground-quicklook-api-revamp/proposals/NNNN-playground-quicklook-api-revamp.md>
Authors: Connor Wakamo <https://github.com/cwakamo>
Review Manager: TBD
Status: Awaiting implementation
<GitHub - cwakamo/swift-evolution at playground-quicklook-api-revamp
The standard library currently includes API which allows a type to customize its representation in Xcode playgrounds and Swift Playgrounds. This API takes the form of the PlaygroundQuickLook enum which enumerates types which are supported for quick looks, and the CustomPlaygroundQuickLookable protocol which allows a type to return a custom PlaygroundQuickLook value for an instance.
This is brittle, and to avoid dependency inversions, many of the cases are typed as taking Any instead of a more appropriate type. This proposal suggests that we deprecate PlaygroundQuickLook and CustomPlaygroundQuickLookable in Swift 4.1 so they can be removed entirely in Swift 5, preventing them from being included in the standard library's stable ABI. To maintain compatibility with older playgrounds, the deprecated symbols will be present in a temporary compatibility shim library which will be automatically imported in playground contexts. (This will represent an intentional source break for projects, packages, and other non-playground Swift code which use PlaygroundQuickLook or CustomPlaygroundQuickLookable when they switch to the Swift 5.0 compiler, even in the compatibility modes.)
Since it is still useful to allow types to provide alternate representations for playgrounds, we propose to add a new protocol to the PlaygroundSupport framework which allows types to do just that. (PlaygroundSupport is a framework delivered by the swift-xcode-playground-support project <https://github.com/apple/swift-xcode-playground-support> which provides API specific to working in the playgrounds environment). The new CustomPlaygroundRepresentable protocol would allow instances to return an alternate object or value (as an Any) which would serve as their representation. The PlaygroundLogger framework, also part of swift-xcode-playground-support, will be updated to understand this protocol.
Swift-evolution thread: Discussion thread topic for that proposal <https://lists.swift.org/pipermail/swift-evolution/>
<GitHub - cwakamo/swift-evolution at playground-quicklook-api-revamp
The PlaygroundQuickLook enum which currently exists in the standard library is substandard:
public enum PlaygroundQuickLook {
case text(String)
case int(Int64)
case uInt(UInt64)
case float(Float32)
case double(Float64)
case image(Any)
case sound(Any)
case color(Any)
case bezierPath(Any)
case attributedString(Any)
case rectangle(Float64, Float64, Float64, Float64)
case point(Float64, Float64)
case size(Float64, Float64)
case bool(Bool)
case range(Int64, Int64)
case view(Any)
case sprite(Any)
case url(String)
case _raw([UInt8], String)
}
The names of these enum cases do not necessarily match current Swift naming conventions (e.g. uInt), and many cases are typed as Any to avoid dependency inversions between the standard library and higher-level frameworks like Foundation and AppKit or UIKit. It also contains cases which the PlaygroundLogger framework does not understand (e.g. sound), and this listing of cases introduces revlock between PlaygroundLogger and the standard library that makes it challenging to introduce support for new types of quick looks.
Values of this enum are provided to the PlaygroundLogger framework by types via conformances to the CustomPlaygroundQuickLookable protocol:
public protocol CustomPlaygroundQuickLookable {
var customPlaygroundQuickLook: PlaygroundQuickLook { get }
}
This protocol itself is not problematic, but if PlaygroundQuickLook is being removed, then it needs to be removed as well. Additionally, there is a companion underscored protocol which should be removed as well:
public protocol _DefaultCustomPlaygroundQuickLookable {
var _defaultCustomPlaygroundQuickLook: PlaygroundQuickLook { get }
}
<GitHub - cwakamo/swift-evolution at playground-quicklook-api-revamp solution
To solve this issue, we propose the following changes:
Introduce a new CustomPlaygroundRepresentable protocol in PlaygroundSupport in Swift 4.1 to allow types to provide an alternate representation for playground logging
Deprecate PlaygroundQuickLook and CustomPlaygroundQuickLookable in Swift 4.1, suggesting users use CustomPlaygroundRepresentable instead
Remove PlaygroundQuickLook and CustomPlaygroundQuickLookable from the standard library in Swift 5.0
Provide an automatically-imported shim library for the playgrounds context to provide the deprecated instances of PlaygroundQuickLook and CustomPlaygroundQuickLookable for pre-Swift 5 playgrounds
<GitHub - cwakamo/swift-evolution at playground-quicklook-api-revamp design
To provide a more flexible API, we propose deprecating and ultimately removing the PlaygroundQuickLook enum and CustomPlaygroundQuickLookable protocol in favor of a simpler design. Instead, we propose introducing a protocol which just provides the ability to return an Any (or nil) that serves as a stand-in for the instance being logged:
/// A type that supplies a custom representation for playground logging.
///
/// All types have a default representation for playgrounds. This protocol
/// allows types to provide custom representations which are then logged in
/// place of the original instance. Alternatively, implementors may choose to
/// return `nil` in instances where the default representation is preferable.
///
/// Playground logging can generate, at a minimum, a structured representation
/// of any type. Playground logging is also capable of generating a richer,
/// more specialized representation of core types -- for instance, the contents
/// of a `String` are logged, as are the components of an `NSColor` or
/// `UIColor`.
///
/// The current playground logging implementation logs specialized
/// representations of at least the following types:
///
/// - `String` and `NSString`
/// - `Int` and `UInt` (including the sized variants)
/// - `Float` and `Double`
/// - `Bool`
/// - `Date` and `NSDate`
/// - `NSAttributedString`
/// - `NSNumber`
/// - `NSRange`
/// - `URL` and `NSURL`
/// - `CGPoint`, `CGSize`, and `CGRect`
/// - `NSColor`, `UIColor`, `CGColor`, and `CIColor`
/// - `NSImage`, `UIImage`, `CGImage`, and `CIImage`
/// - `NSBezierPath` and `UIBezierPath`
/// - `NSView` and `UIView`
///
/// Playground logging may also be able to support specialized representations
/// of other types.
///
/// Implementors of `CustomPlaygroundRepresentable` may return a value of one of
/// the above types to also receive a specialized log representation.
/// Implementors may also return any other type, and playground logging will
/// generated structured logging for the returned value.
public protocol CustomPlaygroundRepresentable {
/// Returns the custom playground representation for this instance, or nil if
/// the default representation should be used.
///
/// If this type has value semantics, the instance returned should be
/// unaffected by subsequent mutations if possible.
var playgroundRepresentation: Any? { get }
}
Additionally, instead of placing this protocol in the standard library, we propose placing this protocol in the PlaygroundSupport framework, as it is only of interest in the playgrounds environment. Should demand warrant it, a future proposal could suggest lowering this protocol into the standard library.
If this proposal is accepted, then code like the following:
extension MyStruct: CustomPlaygroundQuickLookable {
var customPlaygroundQuickLook: PlaygroundQuickLook {
return .text("A description of this MyStruct instance")
}
}
would be replaced with something like the following:
extension MyStruct: CustomPlaygroundRepresentable {
var playgroundRepresentation: Any? {
return "A description of this MyStruct instance"
}
}
This proposal also allows types which wish to be represented structurally (like an array or dictionary) to return a type which is logged structurally instead of requiring an implementation of the CustomReflectable protocol:
extension MyStruct: CustomPlaygroundRepresentable {
var playgroundRepresentation: Any? {
return [1, 2, 3]
}
}
This is an enhancement over the existing CustomPlaygroundQuickLookable protocol, which only supported returning opaque, quick lookable values for playground logging. (By returning an Any?, it also allows instances to opt-in to their standard playground representation if that is preferable some cases.)
Implementations of CustomPlaygroundRepresentable may potentially chain from one to another. For instance, with:
extension MyStruct: CustomPlaygroundRepresentable {
var playgroundRepresentation: Any? {
return "MyStruct representation"
}
}
extension MyOtherStruct: CustomPlaygroundRepresentable {
var playgroundRepresentation: Any? {
return MyStruct()
}
}
Playground logging for MyOtherStruct would generate the string "MyStruct representation" rather than the structural view of MyStruct. It is legal, however, for playground logging implementations to cap chaining to a reasonable limit to guard against infinite recursion.
<GitHub - cwakamo/swift-evolution at playground-quicklook-api-revamp compatibility
This proposal is explicitly suggesting that we make a source-breaking change in Swift 5 to remove PlaygroundQuickLook, CustomPlaygroundQuickLookable, and _DefaultCustomPlaygroundQuickLookable. Looking at a GitHub search, there are fewer than 900 references to CustomPlaygroundQuickLookable in Swift source code; from a cursory glance, many of these are duplicates, from forks of the Swift repo itself (i.e. the definition of CustomPlaygroundQuickLookable in the standard library), or are clearly implemented using pre-Swift 3 names of the enum cases in PlaygroundQuickLook. (As a point of comparison, there are over 185,000 references to CustomStringConvertible in Swift code on GitHub, and over 145,000 references to CustomDebugStringConvertible, so CustomPlaygroundQuickLookable is clearly used many orders of magnitude less than those protocols.) Furthermore, it does not appear that any projects currently in the source compatibility suite use these types.
However, to mitigate the impact of this change, we propose to provide a limited source compatibility shim for the playgrounds context. This will be delivered as part of the swift-xcode-playground-support project as a library containing the deprecated PlaygroundQuickLook and CustomPlaygroundQuickLookable protocols. This library would be imported automatically in playgrounds. This source compatibility shim would not be available outside of playgrounds, so any projects, packages, or other Swift code would be intentionally broken by this change when upgrading to the Swift 5.0 compiler, even when compiling in a compatibility mode.
Due to the limited usage of these protocols, and the potential challenge in migration, this proposal does not include any proposed migrator changes to support the replacement of CustomPlaygroundQuickLookable withCustomPlaygroundRepresentable. Instead, we intend for Swift 4.1 to be a deprecation period for these APIs, allowing any code bases which implement CustomPlaygroundQuickLookable to manually switch to the new protocol. While this migration may not be trivial programatically, it should -- in most cases -- be fairly trivial for someone to hand-migrate toCustomPlaygroundRepresentable. During the deprecation period, the PlaygroundLogger framework will continue to honor implementations of CustomPlaygroundQuickLookable, though it will prefer implementations ofCustomPlaygroundRepresentable if both are present on a given type.
<GitHub - cwakamo/swift-evolution at playground-quicklook-api-revamp on ABI stability
This proposal affects ABI stability as it removes an enum and a pair of protocols from the standard library. Since this proposal proposes adding CustomPlaygroundRepresentable to PlaygroundSupport instead of the standard library, there is no impact of ABI stability from the new protocol, as PlaygroundSupport does not need to maintain a stable ABI, as its clients -- playgrounds -- are always recompiled from source.
Since playgrounds are always compiled from source, the temporary shim library does not represent a new ABI guarantee, and it may be removed if the compiler drops support for the Swift 3 and 4 compatibility modes in a future Swift release.
Removing PlaygroundQuickLook from the standard library also potentially allows us to remove a handful of runtime entry points which were included to support the PlaygroundQuickLook(reflecting:) API.
<GitHub - cwakamo/swift-evolution at playground-quicklook-api-revamp on API resilience
This proposal does not impact API resilience.
<GitHub - cwakamo/swift-evolution at playground-quicklook-api-revamp considered
<GitHub - cwakamo/swift-evolution at playground-quicklook-api-revamp nothing
One valid alternative to this proposal is to do nothing: we could continue to live with the existing enum and protocol. As noted above, these are fairly poor, and do not serve the needs of playgrounds particularly well. Since this is our last chance to remove them prior to ABI stability, we believe that doing nothing is not an acceptable alternative.
<GitHub - cwakamo/swift-evolution at playground-quicklook-api-revamp type-specific protocols
Another alternative we considered was to provide type-specific protocols for providing playground representations. We would introduce new protocols like CustomNSColorConvertible, CustomNSAttributedStringConvertible, etc. which would allow types to provide representations as each of the opaquely-loggable types supported by PlaygroundLogger.
This alternative was rejected as it would balloon the API surface for playgrounds, and it also would not provide a good way to select a preferred representation. (That is, what would PlaygroundLogger select as the representation of an instance if it implemented both CustomNSColorConvertible and CustomNSAttributedStringConvertible?)
<GitHub - cwakamo/swift-evolution at playground-quicklook-api-revamp CustomPlaygroundRepresentable in the standard library
As an alternative to implementing CustomPlaygroundRepresentable in PlaygroundSupport, we could implement it in the standard library. This would make it available in all contexts (i.e. in projects and packages, not just in playgrounds), but this protocol is not particularly useful outside of the playground context, so this proposal elects not to placeCustomPlaygroundRepresentable in the standard library.
Additionally, it should be a source-compatible change to move this protocol to the standard library in a future Swift version should that be desirable. Since playgrounds are always compiled from source, the fact that this would be an ABI change for PlaygroundSupport does not matter, and a compatibility typealias could be provided in PlaygroundSupport to maintain compatibility with code which explicitly qualified the name of the CustomPlaygroundRepresentable protocol.
<GitHub - cwakamo/swift-evolution at playground-quicklook-api-revamp CustomPlaygroundRepresentable return something other than Any?
One minor alternative considered was to have CustomPlaygroundRepresentable return a value with a more specific type than Any?. For example:
protocol CustomPlaygroundRepresentable {
var playgroundRepresentation: CustomPlaygroundRepresentable? { get }
}
or:
protocol PlaygroundRepresentation {}
protocol CustomPlaygroundRepresentable {
var playgroundRepresentation: PlaygroundRepresentation? { get }
}
In both cases, core types which the playground logger supports would conform to the appropriate protocol such that they could be returned from implementations of playgroundRepresentation.
The benefit to this approach is that it is more self-documenting than the approach proposed in this document, as a user can look up all of the types which conform to a particular protocol to know what the playground logger understands. However, this approach has a number of pitfalls, largely because it's intentional that the proposal uses Any instead of a more-constrained protocol. It should be possible to return anything as the stand-in for an instance, including values without opaque playground quick look views, so that it's easier to construct an alternate structured view of a type (without having to override the more complex CustomReflectable protocol). Furthermore, by making the API in the library use a general type like Any, this proposal prevents revlock from occurring between IDEs and the libraries, as the IDE's playground logger can implement support for opaque logging of new types without requiring library changes. (And IDEs can opt to support a subset of types if they prefer, whereas if the libraries promised support an IDE would effectively be compelled to provide it.)