> On Jan 10, 2018, at 12:39 PM, Saagar Jha <saa...@saagarjha.com> wrote:
>
> Well, in my experience performance issues tend to come not from trying to
> display a single object, but when you have an aggregation of many objects.
> For example, displaying one Int is pretty lightweight, as is an [Int] with a
> handful of elements, but displaying an [Int] with million elements is not
> (this is assuming that collections will run the playgroundRepresentation on
> their individual elements as they do currently). I don’t think the current
> proposal can solve this issue as it’s pitched currently. (For those curious,
> this doesn’t have a good solution today, either: the best “solution” I’ve
> been able to come up with is to move performance-sensitive out into a
> Playground’s Sources folder, which isn’t displayed.)
Yes, this proposal does not affect this case: the playground transform will
still instrument all of the source code in the main source file. This proposal
is merely about deprecating/removing a substandard API for controlling how
values are presented in playgrounds with a better, more flexible one. (Though
see my other reply to Chris where I present an alternative which could be
extended to include support for disabling logging altogether for an instance.)
> Fundamentally, I don’t think it’s clear what the “default” value is supposed
> to be: we already have three different interpretations of what it could do:
> do literally nothing (i.e. display an empty representation), use a
> superclass’s representation, or use a structural representation based on
> whether the type is an enum, struct, class, etc. I think we need to clear up
> what the default actually means (and if we even need it at all) before we can
> proceed.
This API is a bit wishy-washy as to what the “default” is. That’s somewhat
intentional — the default presentation of an arbitrary Swift value/object is
defined by the IDE, not by an API in Swift. I think my terminology is a bit
confused here, and I’ll try to address that in a revision of the proposal. Let
me try to clarify this a bit:
The fundamental design of playgrounds is that the compiler will insert calls to
a logging function which is effectively required to take an `Any`. So therefore
every instance of every type must be loggable by the playground logger. The
PlaygroundLogger framework in swift-xcode-playground-support
<https://github.com/apple/swift-xcode-playground-support> implements this by
generating either structured log entries using `Mirror` or specialized, opaque
(aka IDERepr) log entries. PlaygroundLogger will generate a structured log
entry for most instances, but for instances of special types it knows about
(e.g. String, Int, NSColor, UIView, etc.) it will generate an opaque log entry
which an IDE can then consume and display as is appropriate.
The CustomPlaygroundRepresentable API I’ve proposed does exactly one thing: it
allows instances of conforming types to provide an optional stand-in to be used
by the playground logger. So PlaygroundLogger would handle the following cases
thusly:
- If a type conforms to CustomPlaygroundRepresentable and returns a
non-nil value, PlaygroundLogger will generate the appropriate log entry for the
returned value
- If a type conforms to CustomPlaygroundRepresentable and returns nil,
PlaygroundLogger will generate the appropriate log entry for `self`
- If `self` is one of the types (or a subclass of one of the
types) for which PlaygroundLogger generates an opaque entry, PlaygroundLogger
will generate an opaque log entry
- Otherwise, PlaygroundLogger will generate a structured log
entry
This process if potentially recursive (likely up to an implementation-defined
limit): if `Foo: CustomPlaygroundRepresentable` and `Bar:
CustomPlaygroundRepresentable`, and a `Foo` instance returns an instance of
`Bar` from `playgroundRepresentation`, then the playground logger should
effectively log `self.playgroundRepresentation.playgroundRepresentation`.
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