SE-0289 (review #2): Result Builders

[James_Dempsey]

@ilyapuchka

Just builder would work nicely as well and there is no misleading whatsoever in that name. It feels like the only reason to prepped it with something else is to maintain some sort of convention for naming attributes where just @builder will not be symmetric to @propertyWrapper or @discardableResult etc. It would be ridiculous reasoning if that was true imo.

@Daniel_Steinberg

I'm not sure why @builder isn't a simple name that covers what we mean

There's a part of me that really likes the simplicity of @builder. It's short, it's clean, and the type it is used on is a kind of builder.

What made me think it needs further qualification is that this there are already many, many things in Swift code that use the builder design pattern that do not use this feature.

A quick search on GitHub for Swift source files with the term 'builder' but excluding the term '_functionBuilder' shows over 54,000 source files using the term, with types like PathBuilder, AttributedStringBuilder, AdvertisementsBuilder, MerchantRequestBuilder.

The name and concept of 'builder' is already in widespread use in Swift code beyond the usage of this feature, and I would imagine builders that don't use this feature will continue to be created by Swift developers, since it is such a common design pattern.

For me an attribute of plain @builder strongly implies this is the way to make a builder in Swift, as opposed this being one way of defining a builder that works in a particular way supported by this feature.

@Jumhyn also had made the point that Googling 'swift builder' currently brings up any information of anyone using the builder pattern in Swift, using this feature or not.

The two earlier posts are at:

SE-0289: Function Builders

(First, sorry for the deleted messages, I had meant this post to reply directly and got all fouled up trying to fix it.) For me, it's less about any specific future language feature and more that the Builder design pattern is already widely used in Swift code in contexts outside of this feature. Doing a quick search on GitHub for Swift source files with the term 'builder' but excluding the term '_functionBuilder' shows over 54,000 source files using the term. (The number varies per search for…

SE-0289: Function Builders

To add on to this, a search for "swift builder" on Google turns up lots of articles about using the builder design pattern in Swift. Choosing the @builder name would, in the best case, hide these otherwise relevant results. In the worst case, it would make searching for information about the @builder attribute quite difficult. OTOH, searching for "swift result builder" or "swift return value builder" already returns results that almost exclusively discuss "function builders." I don't get the se…