Type Erasure in Swift

Get rid of that type information

Photo by Mark Harpur on Unsplash

Difficulty: Beginner | Easy | Normal | Challenging
This article has been developed using Xcode 11.4.1, and Swift 5.2.2

This article is example laden, and shows how I’ve used Type Erasure in my production Apps. It should help if you wish to know what Type Erasure is and how you might apply it in your Swift code.

Prerequisites:

• You will be expected to be aware how to make a Single View Application, or a Playground to run Swift code
• You will need to know about protocols in Swift
• The heart of this article is a constant (and annoying) talk about generics

Terminology:

Type Erasure: Removing type information

When programming in Swift we have a type-safe language, that is Swift is strongly typed.

Now sometimes you might want to use type erasure, that is removing type information to find out why you might want to lose information in this way we have to think about protocol-oriented programming and specific implementations of the same…

Protocol-oriented programming — A real life need for Type Erasure