I’d very much in favour of a consistent access modifiers across the whole
language and eliminate exclusive `open`. `open/public` protocols are more than
welcome. Plus it’s already has been said that Swift will potentially support
subtyping for value type in some future, where we’ll yet again would need to
align what `public` and `open` will mean. So I’d appreciate all the steps that
could already be made now to align their meaning as much as it’s possible to
this moment.
Am 9. August 2017 um 18:08:09, Matthew Johnson via swift-evolution
(swift-evolution@swift.org) schrieb:
Hi Jordan,
Thanks for bringing this topic up again! I’m glad to see it will receive
attention in Swift 5. I agree with the semantics of your proposed direction.
In terms of syntax, I continue to believe that requiring users to specify a
keyword indicating open or closed *in addition* to public would be unfortunate.
Open / closed is only relevant for public enums and therefore implies public.
We’ve done a really good job of avoiding keyword soup in Swift and the way that
open classes are implicitly public is a good precedent that we should follow.
I also continue to believe that aligning protocols, enums and classes to use
consistent terminology for similar concepts has many advantages. The semantics
would be:
* open: Extensible outside the library
* public: Extensible in future versions of the library (or privately by the
library)
* closed: Fixed set of publicly visible cases / subclasses / conformances
defined by the library and guaranteed not to change without breaking ABI and
source compatibility.
This approach makes public a “soft default” that preserves maximum flexibility
for the library author while allowing them to make a stronger guarantee of
user-extensibility or completeness by changing (rather than adding) a keyword.
It also highlights the symmetry of the two very different user-guarantees a
library may choose to support.
As noted in my previous thread, this approach would require a migration for
protocols as well as enums as the current behavior of public protocols is to
allow conformances outside the library.
There are certainly reasonable arguments to be made for other approaches,
particularly if there is no appetite for changing the semantics of public
protocols (which seems likely). Nevertheless, I think we should keep the
merits of consistency in mind and understand the benefits of alternatives
relative to the more consistent approach as we evaluate them.
In terms of alternatives, what is your opinion on using public as a “soft
default” and assigning it one of the two enum semantics you discuss? Do you
think this makes sense or would you prefer distinct keywords for these two
semantics? I don’t have any really great new ideas, but I’ll throw out
“complete” and “incomplete” as a possibility.
My two cents for now…
Matthew
On Aug 8, 2017, at 5:27 PM, Jordan Rose via swift-evolution
<swift-evolution@swift.org> wrote:
Hi, everyone. Now that Swift 5 is starting up, I'd like to circle back to an
issue that's been around for a while: the source compatibility of enums. Today,
it's an error to switch over an enum without handling all the cases, but this
breaks down in a number of ways:
- A C enum may have "private cases" that aren't defined inside the original
enum declaration, and there's no way to detect these in a switch without
dropping down to the rawValue.
- For the same reason, the compiler-synthesized 'init(rawValue:)' on an
imported enum never produces 'nil', because who knows how anyone's using C
enums anyway?
- Adding a new case to a Swift enum in a library breaks any client code that
was trying to switch over it.
(This list might sound familiar, and that's because it's from a message of mine
on a thread started by Matthew Johnson back in February called "[Pitch]
consistent public access modifiers". Most of the rest of this email is going to
go the same way, because we still need to make progress here.)
At the same time, we really like our exhaustive switches, especially over enums
we define ourselves. And there's a performance side to this whole thing too; if
all cases of an enum are known, it can be passed around much more efficiently
than if it might suddenly grow a new case containing a struct with 5000 Strings
in it.
Behavior
I think there's certain behavior that is probably not terribly controversial:
- When enums are imported from Apple frameworks, they should always require a
default case, except for a few exceptions like NSRectEdge. (It's Apple's job to
handle this and get it right, but if we get it wrong with an imported enum
there's still the workaround of dropping down to the raw value.)
- When I define Swift enums in the current framework, there's obviously no
compatibility issues; we should allow exhaustive switches.
Everything else falls somewhere in the middle, both for enums defined in
Objective-C:
- If I define an Objective-C enum in the current framework, should it allow
exhaustive switching, because there are no compatibility issues, or not,
because there could still be private cases defined in a .m file?
- If there's an Objective-C enum in another framework (that I built locally
with Xcode, Carthage, CocoaPods, SwiftPM, etc.), should it allow exhaustive
switching, because there are no binary compatibility issues, or not, because
there may be source compatibility issues? We'd really like adding a new enum
case to not be a breaking change even at the source level.
- If there's an Objective-C enum coming in through a bridging header, should it
allow exhaustive switching, because I might have defined it myself, or not,
because it might be non-modular content I've used the bridging header to import?
And in Swift:
- If there's a Swift enum in another framework I built locally, should it allow
exhaustive switching, because there are no binary compatibility issues, or not,
because there may be source compatibility issues? Again, we'd really like
adding a new enum case to not be a breaking change even at the source level.
Let's now flip this to the other side of the equation. I've been talking about
us disallowing exhaustive switching, i.e. "if the enum might grow new cases you
must have a 'default' in a switch". In previous (in-person) discussions about
this feature, it's been pointed out that the code in an otherwise-fully-covered
switch is, by definition, unreachable, and therefore untestable. This also
isn't a desirable situation to be in, but it's mitigated somewhat by the fact
that there probably aren't many framework enums you should exhaustively switch
over anyway. (Think about Apple's frameworks again.) I don't have a great
answer, though.
For people who like exhaustive switches, we thought about adding a new kind of
'default'—let's call it 'unknownCase' just to be able to talk about it. This
lets you get warnings when you update to a new SDK, but is even more likely to
be untested code. We didn't think this was worth the complexity.
Terminology
The "Library Evolution" doc (mostly written by me) originally called these
"open" and "closed" enums ("requires a default" and "allows exhaustive
switching", respectively), but this predated the use of 'open' to describe
classes and class members. Matthew's original thread did suggest using 'open'
for enums as well, but I argued against that, for a few reasons:
- For classes, "open" and "non-open" restrict what the client can do. For
enums, it's more about providing the client with additional guarantees—and
"non-open" is the one with more guarantees.
- The "safe" default is backwards: a merely-public class can be made 'open',
while an 'open' class cannot be made non-open. Conversely, an "open" enum can
be made "closed" (making default cases unnecessary), but a "closed" enum cannot
be made "open".
That said, Clang now has an 'enum_extensibility' attribute that does take
'open' or 'closed' as an argument.
On Matthew's thread, a few other possible names came up, though mostly only for
the "closed" case:
- 'final': has the right meaning abstractly, but again it behaves differently
than 'final' on a class, which is a restriction on code elsewhere in the same
module.
- 'locked': reasonable, but not a standard term, and could get confused with
the concurrency concept
- 'exhaustive': matches how we've been explaining it (with an "exhaustive
switch"), but it's not exactly the enum that's exhaustive, and it's a long
keyword to actually write in source.
- 'extensible': matches the Clang attribute, but also long
I don't have better names than "open" and "closed", so I'll continue using them
below even though I avoided them above. But I would really like to find some.
Proposal
Just to have something to work off of, I propose the following:
1. All enums (NS_ENUMs) imported from Objective-C are "open" unless they are
declared "non-open" in some way (likely using the enum_extensibility attribute
mentioned above).
2. All public Swift enums in modules compiled "with resilience" (still to be
designed) have the option to be either "open" or "closed". This only applies to
libraries not distributed with an app, where binary compatibility is a concern.
3. All public Swift enums in modules compiled from source have the option to be
either "open" or "closed".
4. In Swift 5 mode, a public enum should be required to declare if it is "open"
or "closed", so that it's a conscious decision on the part of the library
author. (I'm assuming we'll have a "Swift 4 compatibility mode" next year that
would leave unannotated enums as "closed".)
5. None of this affects non-public enums.
(4) is the controversial one, I expect. "Open" enums are by far the common case
in Apple's frameworks, but that may be less true in Swift.
Why now?
Source compatibility was a big issue in Swift 4, and will continue to be an
important requirement going into Swift 5. But this also has an impact on the
ABI: if an enum is "closed", it can be accessed more efficiently by a client.
We don't have to do this before ABI stability—we could access all enums the
slow way if the library cares about binary compatibility, and add another
attribute for this distinction later—but it would be nice™ (an easy model for
developers to understand) if "open" vs. "closed" was also the primary
distinction between "indirect access" vs. "direct access".
I've written quite enough at this point. Looking forward to feedback!
Jordan
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