Method Dispatch in Swift Protocols and Inheritance

Runtime or Compile time?

Photo by Tolga Ulkan on Unsplash

Difficulty: Beginner | Easy | Normal | Challenging

This article has been developed using Xcode 11.5, and Swift 5.2.4

Prerequisites:

• You will be expected to be aware how to make a Single View Application in Swift.
• You should know something about Protocols in Swift
• It would be useful to understand something about Polymorphism in Swift, since Dispatch is about polymorphic operation calls.

Terminology:

Compile time: the time in which the programming code is converted to the machine code

Dispatch: The process of selecting which implementation of polymorphic operation to call at runtime

Dynamic Dispatch: A form of polymorphism resolved at run time. Reference types

Method Requirements: Specifc instance and type methods to be implemented by conforming types

Runtime: The period of time where a program is running

Static Dispatch: A form of polymorphism fully resolved at compile time. Applies to Value and reference types

The Polymorphic example