Even though AnyHashable is type erased, it's still type specific you must know its type in order to cast it back to its original type, right?
How does AnyHashable get this power? NSNumber also can be casted this way to any numeric types and Bool. Compiler special bestow magic to these types? Are there more of these magical types?
Without knowing AnyHashable's special cast ability, I was doing this:
anAnyHashable.base as? Int
now I know it's not necessary to use .base, just cast directly. Even the the doc on .base is show this.. The doc should make clear cast directly on AnyHashable is allowed.
dump(anAnyHashable)
▿ AnyHashable(6)
- value: 6
AnyHashable has this value field, and the type is the actual type. So AnyHashable is very special, like a generic.
The standard library type AnyHashable is written partially in C++