Extensions with Generic Where clauses in Swift

Require the specific element in question to be a specific type.

Protocols are extremely important in Swift. Equally Extensions offer flexibility and allow us to add functionality to both Objects and Protocols — but here is an interesting way in which these tools can be combined in Swift.

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Difficulty: Beginner | Easy | Normal | Challenging

Prerequisites:

• Be able to produce a “Hello, World!” iOS application (guide HERE)
• Knowledge of extensions in Swift (guide HERE)
• Preferably have some knowledge of Swift’s comparable protocol (guide HERE)

Terminology

Extensions: Extensions add new functionality to a class, struct, enum or protocol

Generics: Reusable functions and types that can work with any type (or subset of a certain type

The example

Imagine we want to have entries on a Leaderboard. In order to do so, we decide to create a Class to represent each entry on the leaderboard.