SE-0239: Add Codable conformance to Range types

I concur with everything @mdiep says above.

If we want Swift to be a convenient language for working with the kind of JSON that actually exists in the wild we have a long way to go. Encoder / Decoder level strategies are simply not effective in dealing with the JSON produced by many APIs which often require property / value level strategies. It also means that the JSON encoding specified by a type is not stable if it directly encodes values where the strategy may he overriden. I have never encountered a use case where this is actually necessary so it seems like an unfortunate point of fragility in the encoded representation of such types.

As has been pointed out a few times already, wrappers get the job done but also require the user to forgive synthesis. This effectively means that in many contexts the only sensible thing to do is use an extra-linguistic code generator. This is unfortunate for everyone, but especially for beginners trying to learn by working with a public API if interest.

Further, I want to point out that @Tony_Parker’s comments are too exclusively focused on consuming JSON and ignore altogether the fact that many of the criticisms in this thread are focused on the JSON that is produced by Swift, especially the JSON that is produced by default by aggregate standard library and Foundation types. The simple fact is that the design philosophy espoused by the team for Codable is fundamentally incompatible with producing good JSON out of the box.

Stepping back, it is fair to ask whether producing good JSON out of the box should be a goal or not (by the conventional expectations of the web community, not an idiosyncratic Swift community standard). I am arguing that it should be a goal, especially if we want Swift to be a good language for writing web APIs. To repeat what I have said before, we should not need to use wrappers or annotations of any kind at all just to get a reasonable JSON representation of standard library and Foundation types (if we have a goal of being a good language for working with JSON).

As I have also said before, this is especially the case for less experienced or thoughtful developers who will wrote APIs using the simplest code possible without giving a thought to the JSON representation. We should take responsibility at the language and library level to ensure that the JSON produced by our types is reasonable and composed in a reasonable way. This will benefit everyone across the web who consumes APIs written in Swift.

JSON is inherently a rather messy domain. We can either embrace that and provide solutions that meet real world needs or we can punt and leave users to fend for themselves. The current approach of Codable tries to take a middle path while also generalizing to support other serialization formats. I think the feedback in this thread is that this approach isn’t sufficient to make Swift a good language for working with JSON. It also makes it hard to evaluate a proposal like this which would be a no-brainer +1 if Codable was strictly focused on compact, often proprietary, binary formats.

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I'm struggling to understand this point. What does it mean to “mistakenly expect the default encoding”? They get an encoding for a variety of formats that will successfully round trip through the decoder, which is the goal of the Codable protocol as I understand it. A hypothetical JSONCodable or HumanReadableCodable protocol would/should have a very different design.

The reason I requested the unkeyed representation for Range in the first place is because I believe the standard library should be producing concise JSON output for Range that does not impose an unavoidable overhead of encoding the same string key N times, which is important in the cases where you encode many Range values at a time (like a big array).

In any case, I support this proposal because I think the best way to improve the interop of JSON and Swift is to continue to make focused, iterative refinements. That will move us forward. We can have conversations about language improvements which can help Codable in separate proposals. There are a lot of great ideas out there, but we don't need to sink this one because we don't have the perfect solution for all other scenarios.

This seems odd to mention as a Codable escape hatch, as it really has nothing to do with Codable at all. It's just that JSONEncoder/Decoder had to adopt the pattern (or something like it) in order to work with JSON at all.

1 Like

I think we have a fundamental disagreement here - if compactness is the priority then JSON is probably not right choice in the first place. JSON by its very nature often repeats the same string key N times. This is usually not considered a liability but in fact is usually considered an advantage of the JSON format as it makes the format a lot easier for humans to work with.

My intent is not to sink this proposal or to be opposed to focused, iterative refinements. In fact, I have intentionally not even offered a clear +1 or -1 on the proposal itself. My posts are intended to call attention to what I think are important issues, the most fundamental of which is that I think if standard library and Foundation types that don't have a trivial or obvious JSON representation are going to have a JSON representation at all that representation should be considered public and should go through the evolution process.

4 Likes

I've been meaning to respond to this thread for a while now and haven't quite had the time to summarize my thoughts — I'll be responding to a few points here (@anandabits, I'm not trying to pick on your responses, but you do a great job of hitting all of the points that I'm trying to address from throughout the thread).

I'd like to address the topic of JSON here up front, because it seems to me that this is the crux of your argument (if I am mistaken, please correct me!). In doing this, I'd like to separate the layers of the Codable feature as we designed it, to indicate why I think that focusing on any specific target format is explicitly a non-goal of the Codable feature (at the compiler and stdlib layers) itself, and is instead entirely within the realm of the Encoders and Decoders that implement it.

To summarize the goals we had in mind here:

  • There is inherently a push and pull between the need for a given type T to produce a given encoding E1, and a consumer of T to receive a given encoding E2. In the lucky cases, E1 and E2 align perfectly, but as this whole thread indicates, E1 and E2 are often different
  • Thus, someone has to be able to control the output encoding on both the producer and consumer layer, be it the type T itself, the Encoder responsible, or a third party in charge of coordinating the whole process
  • As such, we designed the feature to offer the following layers of matching E1 to E2:
    1. Type T offers its preferred, and default representation in the form of an implementation of init(from:) and encode(to:). This acts as a suitable default that is not intended to target any individual format in existence, present or future. I stress this point because this is by design
    2. One layer above, the Encoder may choose to ignore this default representation in favor of one that it decides is more suitable for the specific format the Encoder targets. Format-specific customizations apply here, and they may be opt-in (e.g. encoding strategies, which are not formalized or mandated by the Codable protocols, as noted by @Jon_Shier)
    3. The final arbiter is the entity performing the encoding, be it an app or a framework or some other frontend communicating with the service in question. This layer may choose to override the final representation on a case-by-case basis, by either using wrapper types, or strategies if offered, or extension shenanigans to override the implementation of a given type within the current module (which is possible)

[There are other layers which may be injected here — for instance, a type U which contains a T may choose to forgo encoding the T altogether and encode something manually instead; in this instance, it can win out over other strategies as well.]

To be very specific here: the goal is to allow layer 1 to offer a format-agnostic default representation of the type; layer 2 may offer a format-specific refinement of the type representation (whether overridden with a strategy or silently); layer 3 can offer endpoint-specific refinements suitable for a specific API or endpoint.

So within the context of this design, I would say that I personally do not believe that Swift the language, or Swift the standard library should care about producing JSON out of the box, good or bad. The standard library implementations currently deal exclusively with layer 1 of the hierarchy: providing defaults which are format-agnostic, and provide an efficient and concise representation that can work with many varying formats. (See also: XML was really popular 10–15 years ago; JSON is really popular now; format Z is likely to be popular in 5–10 years as well; we should be in the business of looking to the far future as well as to the present.) If we decide to move format-specific implementations into the stdlib, that will be a time to decide on a policy here.

Instead, if we want to focus on JSON, we should limit discussion exclusively to whether a tool like JSONEncoder can and should override the default implementation of Range (which we can do!). I don't think we should be throwing the baby out with the bathwater because of JSON — we can have the best of both worlds, by design: the standard implementation for Range can do something conservative and efficient, and JSONEncoder can do something else, with or without a customizable strategy.

I think this goes to invalidate some of the arguments that you're making: property- and value-level choices can only be made by overriding init(from:) and encode(to:), and in this case, it doesn't matter what implementation exists for T as it's being overridden.

I harp on this because we I see strategies being contested often: strategies are meant to help offer consistent formatting for specific types which may be necessary due to limitations in, say, the parser sitting at the API endpoint. If your API (at the design layer, ignoring the actual server implementation) requires a specific property-by-property format, none of this discussion really applies: you're going to need to offer that override, either with wrapper types sprinkled through (for less granular changes), or by implementing init(from:) and encode(to:) manually (for super granular decisions).

On this note, I'd like to say that we've put some thought into making this easier, and I think it can be. Although we haven't had the bandwidth to implement some of what we've discussed in threads here on the forums about adaptors/annotations which would allow you to customize properties without giving up synthesis, it's something I'd like to see.

That being said, correctness here should, in my mind, trump convenience: convenience can be improved incrementally, but in the arena of serialization formats, we've usually got only one shot at getting things right. Sometimes, wrapper types are simply the way to go by design. As shown in this thread or other discussions, there are varying opinions on what the implementation here should look like, and no matter what we decide, someone will have to adapt the type to their specific endpoint. This is what layer 3 is for.


To leave a final note on my conclusions here: either you care about the particular representation of type T (you need to override the default representation for an endpoint-specific representation, in which case the default representation doesn't matter), or you don't (in which case the default representation doesn't matter). So this is a qualitative matter of "how do we decide on a format-specific default", and "how do we make the default most applicable so we can get folks to fall into the latter case most often".

In my mind, the stdlib should not care about format-specific defaults, and instead, we should pull this JSON discussion into a separate thread and review what we think should be done at the JSON level. This should be done with some amount of internal review and discussion as well. JSONEncoder can offer a different representation, whether overridable via a strategy (e.g. Date) or not (e.g. URL). [And if a strategy is not sufficient for your use-case, none of this matters since you're in the business of overriding the implementation somewhere, no matter what.]

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A conditional +1 if we also add a strategy to JSONEncoder/Decoder with something like:

enum RangeStrategy {
    case array
    case dictionary(start: String, end: String)
}

It would be nice to offer a case for start/length as well, but I am not sure how that would work in the general case which might not support the necessary transforms...

If standard library types provide string keys, should they also provide integer keys?

For example:

extension ClosedRange: Codable where Bound: Codable {
  private enum CodingKeys: Int, CodingKey {
    case from = 0x66726f6d
    case thru = 0x74687275
  }
}
  • JSONEncoder would use "from" and "thru" string keys.
  • Other encoders could use 'from' and 'thru' integer keys.

Leaving aside the question of what the ideal representation should be…

…this does not make any sense to me. I don’t see how it can be logically coherent to consider the serialization of a type to be an implementation detail, and also provide encoders for interchange formats. Regardless of what the representation is, it should be specified – for the benefit of JSONEncoder but also for any other encoders for interchange formats that may exist out there.

If it is truly the belief of the core team that the standard library can and should add new opaque, unspecified representations, JSONEncoder should be deprecated and Codable should be discouraged except in language- or framework-specific formats like NSKeyedArchiver.

(I also believe that NSKeyedArchiver is a horrible trap that shouldn’t be exposed as API, and doesn’t motivate a special language feature like Codable synthesis, but that’s a tangent.)

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Thank you for responding @itaiferber. I really appreciate you engaging with this discussion.

I wouldn't say JSON is the crux of my argument. As you pointed out, it is only the format of the moment. I have emphasized JSON in my argument because it is a concrete use case everyone can understand. Everything I have been saying can be generalized to any format that is conventionally prioritizes ease of human consumption above compactness.

One of the fundamental points I am making is that for aggregate types I don't think it is possible to define a default that is suitable for all formats, yet Codable requires a type to attempt to just that.

The mantra we like to repeat in the Swift community is that protocols are not just about syntax, but also about semantics. There is a significant semantic conflict between encoding to formats that prioritize compactness and encoding to formats that prioritize human consumption and / or self-documentation.

There is also a significant semantic conflict evidenced by the discussion of whether the encoded representation of a type should be considered a private implementation detail or a public specification that receives community input. I think it is appropriate for the representation to be considered private for binary formats prioritizing compactness but not for textual formats that prioritize human consumption and self-documentation. If human consumption is a priority then the format must be specified and it is reasonable to request input by the community of humans contributing to Swift's evolution.

For these reasons, Codable is starting to feel to me like a problematic overgeneralization that doesn't take the semantics of encoding and serialization formats seriously enough. Fortunately we have options that don't involve tying ourselves to specific formats. We can model the semantic patterns we see in the domain of encoding formats.\

These feels like an ad-hoc solution. The example of URL is a good one. There are a lot of formats where URL should be encoded as a String. If this behavior lives in JSONEncoder then any other encoders for similar textual formats will not benefit from that behavior by default and will need to re-implement that behavior. Worse, there are a lot of types the implementation of any given encoder won't know about.

I can understand this perspective and don't disagree within the context of the design as the team at Apple intended it. If anything, this thread has highlighted the fact that at least some of us in the community want Swift to be good out of the box at targeting textual formats which prioritize human usability (of which JSON is currently most popular). Secondarily, this thread has highlighted the fact that Codable was not designed to meet this goal. I think many of us would also like Swift to be good out of the box at targeting formats that priories compactness. These are not specific formats, but specific priorities that matter a lot in practice when we serialize data.

I am arguing that these defaults are not actually format agnostic. You even state here that they choose an efficient and concise representation. This is fine for some formats, but also not the right choice for many other formats. In fact, it is not great for the formats that happen to be some of the most pervasive formats in the world. JSON may fall out of fashion, but for the foreseeable future I would bet quite heavily that if something new gains favor it would also be a textual format that is reasonably self-documenting.

That's fair. This thread has moved in a direction I didn't anticipate when I first replied. I still do feel it is relevant to the current review though. I would support this proposal as-is if it becomes clear that the semantics of Codable choose to prioritize compactness and we agree that given these semantics Codable is not an adequate solution for formats such as JSON (which should lead to work exploring improved support for textual, self-documenting formats).

As I mentioned above, this feels like a pretty unfortunate ad-hoc solution tied to a specific encoder. Whatever override we would do for JSON would likely be applicable to a very broad range of formats that share similar characteristics (XML, YAML, etc).

I'm speaking more broadly than the current design of Codable. Imagine using attributes or other annotations at the property level that specify encoding policies. I have written a Sourcery template that supports a broad family of annotations for this purpose. This template very intentionally lowers all dates to specific string or numeric representations in order to ensure consistent serialization of values regardless of the date encoding strategy specified on the encoder.

In my experience, encoder level strategies are something to avoid. I don't want the encoded representation of my type changing based on the configuration of the encoder / decoder. This allows incompatible encoded representations to be produced by a single Codable conformance. For this reason, it feels like it goes too far in favoring convenience over precision.

This is good to hear!

I agree. My argument is that the current design doesn't have strong enough semantics and that there are at least two broad families of serialization formats that have conflicting semantics. Codable has in some sense chosen one set of serialization semantics without explicitly stating this and is used for formats that where this set of semantics produces out of the box results that are not great (i.e. encoding ranges as an array). So my argument is fundamentally about correctness, not convenience.

I would modify this to say that sometimes a custom encoding strategy is the way to go. Wrapper types are only one way of getting there. But I do agree that a custom strategy is sometimes required.

There is a third case here: I care, but if the default is specified and happens to align with my needs. And a fourth case: I do care but there is a mechanism to specify the policy / strategy I want to use without writing my own custom implementation.

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Thank you for the detailed response! I had my own response sitting here that addressed your points one-by-one, but I don't think that this will actually serve us all that well.

If I may, I think I understand your argument better now to be "given the current limitations of Codable, are we interested in forever committing to a default representation for types which is human readable, or optimized for performance and conciseness?", siding with human readability. Is this correct?

If so, I'd like to express the fact that we're well aware of the current limitations of Codable implementation, due to current language limitations, and time constraints. I agree that this thread has moved in a different direction than originally intended, and while we don't agree on all of the specifics, I think we both want to make Codable better. Codable's limitations don't need to stay, and we actively want to evolve the API and language to a point where we can make it the best it can be — an API which does the right thing in the majority of cases will benefit everyone.

Things that are clear from this thread we're lacking here, among others:

  1. A convenient way to provide easier property-by-property overriding of representations, without having to lose synthesis (e.g. via adaptors/annotations/etc.)
  2. An easier way to express for a given type T across all usages of that type that a human-readable form is preferred over a concise form, without necessarily having to use a format-specific strategy (e.g. a way for Range to potentially offer both representations and choose between them, so all Encoders potentially benefit)

It sounds to me like these two would go a long way toward making this issue less prevalent.

So, can we work together to help design new language and library features to address these constraints, rather than giving up on Codable altogether? We'd like community feedback and involvement here, and I think starting a new thread for this is a good idea. Internally, we've definitely got ideas about where to take things, but haven't had the bandwidth to push them forward yet.


To briefly summarize my thoughts about this matter directly:

  • I think the human-readability-vs.-performance axis is more interesting to discuss than JSON-vs.-other-formats, and I generally object to the idea that "the right choice" will be obvious, even for formats like JSON. Not everyone writing JSON needs to target human readability, nor is JSON the most human-readable format out there. Even within the collection of folks who have to write JSON, performance and compactness can be very reasonable goals — sometimes, you have to serialize to JSON because the target endpoint requires it; sometimes, it's the format that all the devs on the team know best; sometimes, it's just an easy default to reach for because the server platform has easy-to-use JSON tooling. A lot of work has gone into optimizing JSON parsing and efficiency throughout various frameworks and platforms, and it's not unreasonable to prefer targeting that as a default
  • However, we should work toward providing clear support for both, in my opinion, and make it significantly easier to express a preference for human readability over performance in a way that still allows types like Range to offer one or both without having to sacrifice either. This is possible today, but more cumbersome than we can likely do in the future
  • As such, we should invest our efforts into improving language features and tooling around where we'd like Codable to go such that types like Range can give a more performant default, without sacrificing readability where it matters
  • Thus, Range's default implementation being less readable is reasonable (and IMO preferable in more common cases), and we should aim not at forcing it to be human readable, but offer ways to improve this for formats we care about, out of the box

As a final point, the guidelines we've followed for all currently offered Codable types are as follows, in order of highest to lowest priority:

  1. Backwards compatibility: might the type ever evolve in the future? If so, keyed containers are desirable so we have the most flexibility in offering compatible implementations. For instance, most of our types (e.g. DateComponents) use keyed containers for the future addition of properties; others have a very specific definition which will never change (e.g. CGPoint will never add a 3rd value; Date will only ever need to be represented by its time interval; Data is conceptually always going to be an array of bytes), and in these cases, we stray from keyed containers for:
  2. Performance: within the constraints of compatibility, how can we best represent the type? This is relatively simple: keyed containers are obvious; multiple non-keyed values go in an unkeyed container; single values encode as themselves
  3. Readability: within the constraints of the above two, how do we make the types more readable? (This affects names for key values in keyed containers, and ordering in unkeyed containers)

Hence, following these same guidelines, it's not unreasonable for Range types to use non-keyed containers by default: their representations will never change, and for performance, they may be represented in unkeyed/single-value containers. The goal is now to also offer readability for those who need it.

14 Likes

What is your evaluation of the proposal?

+1

Each type of range could also encode/decode an operator string to/from its unkeyed container.

 extension ClosedRange: Encodable where Bound: Encodable {
   public func encode(to encoder: Encoder) throws {
     var container = encoder.unkeyedContainer()
     try container.encode(self.lowerBound)
+    try container.encode("...")
     try container.encode(self.upperBound)
   }
 }

For example, a closed range of Date.distantPast ... Date.distantFuture would be:

  • [-63114076800,"...",63113904000] or
  • ["0001-12-30T00:00:00Z","...","4001-01-01T00:00:00Z"]

using a JSONEncoder.

Is the problem being addressed significant enough to warrant a change to Swift?

Yes.

Does this proposal fit well with the feel and direction of Swift?

Yes.

How much effort did you put into your review? A glance, a quick reading, or an in-depth study?

A quick reading.

With regards to this proposal, yeah. If we are willing to:

  • commit to a direction that says the semantics of Codable target compact / performant representations
  • work towards something else (possibly a layer on top of Codable?) with semantics targeting self-documenting representations
  • provide fully-specified (via SE) default self-documenting representations for the necessary standard library and Foundation types
  • agree that JSONEncoder and JSONDecoder should prefer the self-documenting representation by default when it becomes available (with a migration for code that relies on current behavior preferring the concise representation)

then I think this proposal is well-aligned with the long term direction and would support it.

I agree, we do share the same goal! I hope you feel this discussion has been helpful in identifying some improvements we need to make to get there.

Right, I think it's fine to make all representations available to all compatible encoders, but we need a way to specify a default that is intended for encoders targeting self-documenting serialization formats, and we need our encoders targeting such formats to use that default.

And ideally it would be possible to specify distinct property-level overrides for both the compact default and the self-documenting default.

These would solve the pressing semantic issue and the steep cliff encountered when non-default representations are necessary. The third issue is the need to have fully specified representations that can be relied upon for our own fully specified formats. Self-documenting representations should be fully specified as the ability to easily correlate the representation with a value of a type is significant motivator for choosing self-documenting representations in the first place.

In the fullness of time, there are some other things are also necessary. Most prominently support for a range of encoding strategies for enums with associated values. The generator I use does this using annotations and it is extremely useful. There are a handful of other policy annotations it supports that would also be good candidates for eventual Codable features. My template also supports coding key annotations which allow coding key overrides to be specified inline with the property instead of having to explicitly declare a CodingKeys enum.

Absolutely! I'm not giving up on Codable - I just want to see its semantics clarified and see us commit to addressing use cases that fall outside of those semantics. New threads to discuss these topics sounds like a good idea to me. Would you be willing to start them based on with the thoughts of the internal team?

Agreed. JSON is only the best contemporary concrete example.

I am certainly not arguing that we should require prioritizing human usability when working with JSON but I do think it's the appropriate default. And of course we want the best performance possible given the constraints imposed by higher priorities so it is great that a lot of work has gone into optimizing JSON performance! But I don't think the existence of that work is an argument for making performance the top priority when choosing what representation is used for JSON by default.

This sounds like a great direction!

I agree, as long as we clarify that the semantics of Codable imply prioritizing performance over human usability.

These guidelines make a lot of sense given the semantics you are assigning to Codable along side a goal of supporting readability in some other way. Thank you for laying them out so clearly! I agree that the implementation chosen

At this point, I have come to the conclusion that I support this proposal on the condition that we clearly specify Codable as having semantics described by the guidelines @itaiferber provided above. Thanks to everyone who contributed to the discussion!

  • What is your evaluation of the proposal?

+1

  • Is the problem being addressed significant enough to warrant a change to Swift?

Yes. As the proposal mentions, the standard library defines/owns both the Range type and Codable protocols. Nobody else can add a conformance without risking conflicts.

  • Does this proposal fit well with the feel and direction of Swift?

Other standard library types which can support Codable do, so I think it makes sense for Range to do so as well. AFAIK, the standard library makes no guarantees about how these types will be encoded. The only expectation I have is that the encoded representations will continue to be decodable in future versions of the standard library (not documented anywhere AFAIK).

  • If you have used other languages or libraries with a similar feature, how do you feel that this proposal compares to those?

N/A

  • How much effort did you put into your review? A glance, a quick reading, or an in-depth study?

Read the proposal and the discussion in this thread. Considered it a couple of times.


If you really care about how your type is represented when encoded (e.g. because you have some API specification to match with), you should not be afraid to write your own conformances to Codable. I can't believe people are talking about it like it's the worst/most difficult thing in the world. For sure, compiler synthesis is convenient when it suits your needs, but sometimes programming involves actually writing some code.

If the default implementation is not right for you, it's very simple to work around:

struct ABC: Codable {
  var name: String
  var values: Range<Int>

  enum JSONKeys: String, CodingKey {
    case name = "name"
    case minVal = "minVal"
    case maxVal = "maxVal"
  }

  func encode(to encoder: Encoder) throws {
    var box = encoder.container(keyedBy: JSONKeys.self)
    try box.encode(name, forKey: .name)
    try box.encode(values.lowerBound, forKey: .minVal)
    try box.encode(values.upperBound, forKey: .maxVal)
  }

  init(from decoder: Decoder) throws {
		let box = try decoder.container(keyedBy: JSONKeys.self)
    name   = try box.decode(String.self, forKey: .name)
    values = try box.decode(Int.self, forKey: .minVal)..<box.decode(Int.self, forKey: .maxVal)
  }

  init(name: String, values: Range<Int>) {
    self.name = name; self.values = values
  }
}

let test = ABC(name: "test", values: 36..<43)
let data = try! JSONEncoder().encode(test)
print(String(bytes: data, encoding: .utf8)!) // {"name":"test","maxVal":43,"minVal":36}

Ideally there shouldn't be any distinction between a fast and a readable coding.

Either an objet has properties, then it uses a keyed container, either it is a list, and it uses an unkeyed container. If we keep it that way, there is no question of JSON or binary file, just a data representation which is simple and fairly format agnostic.

If we want to improve performances, isn't there any other solution than changing the coding? like, if we have an object and we are sure than its properties won't change, we can optimize the coding by using an unkeyed contained behind the scene, by ordering the keys in a way or another. We would make this work by declaring the coding keys in a frozen enum.

Certainly in some cases this is true, but the current proposal is a great example of where this distinction matters a lot. This comes up often enough that it warrants being designed for.

+1. This was a notable omission to the original set of Codable stdlib types.

This warrants a change to Swift. As a consumer of Codable, I can reasonably expect that ranges will be Codable by default.

This is an intuitive next step for codability in Swift. Range is one of the only remaining Codable holdouts. I had assumed this would breaze through review but it seems there are a lot of concerns about implementation and compatibility.
I’d just like to point out that keeping these things as private implementation detail has been the norm for most stdlib proposals. This is indeed what enables us to be able to change things in the future in a backwards-compatible, non–ABI-breaking way in the future. These theoretical future proposals can address human-readability, conditional synthesis, etc. but I think this proposal fits very well with the stated goals of Codable and the stdlib so far. To change those goals is out of scope for this proposal.

Regarding other languages, NSRange does not appear to conform to NSCoding, but many specific range types like SKRange do.

I read the proposal and this review thread.

While the review period has technically ended, please continue discussion on this proposal. The Core Team will be reviewing this proposal in the new year.

Proposal Accepted

Thank you everyone for the very insightful feedback provided during this review. It provided some great insights into the Swift's community uses and desires on Codable.

Regarding the proposal itself, the Core Team has decided to accept it, with the proposal amended to include the details of the encoding format chosen. The data encoding chosen is an important semantic invariant of the API that is potentially observable by users and important for binary compatibility. Future proposals like this one that discuss adopting Codable should include details — and when necessary — rationale on the encoding chosen. Further, it would be valuable if the current chosen encodings for Standard Library types were also documented so that users using the default encodings for those types can either rely upon those encodings or know when they need to customize their encoding logic for a specific task.

In addition, the Core Team decided to extend the proposal to include Codable conformance for ContiguousArray, which was similarly missing from the Standard Library. This felt like a case that required no additional review discussion.

For Range types, the Core Team concluded from the review conversation that an unkeyed container representation seems like a reasonable default, but also recognized from the discussion on this thread that there are cases where a keyed representation is preferred. What this review thread further illustrated is the need to make Codable more flexible to provide the encoding customizations needed to service different tasks. There is no set of defaults for encoding that will satisfy every use-case. Some use-cases will prioritize serialization performance over human readability, and quite often the inverse. The Core Team would like to encourage the community to channel the energy that appeared in this thread to discussing general enhancements to Codeable to make it more flexible and amendable to serving more use-cases more easily, and @itaiferber has initiated a thread to do just that.

Thank you again for everyone who participated in this review!

10 Likes