Type Erasure

Quite often, when Swift's associated types are dicussed, type erasure is mentioned as another solution to the problem of handling the issues that associated types bring along.

Type Erasure in the context of associated types solves one particular problem. We'll use computers as an example. Back in the golden age of desktop operating systems, you could buy a desktop computer with many non-X86 CPU architectures: PowerPC, Alpha, Sparc, 68000, and so on. One of the many differences were the endianness of the architecture. Lets model these computers in Swift:

protocol CPU {

     var littleEndian: Bool { get }

}



struct PowerPC: CPU {

     let littleEndian = false

}



struct X86: CPU {

     let littleEndian = true

}

Next up, we want to define a protocol for a computer. It could be a desktop computer or a phone or maybe a game console, so we use a protocol. In order to model the CPU, we're using an associated type, so that the actual type can define the CPU:

protocol Computer {

     associatedtype ProcessorType: CPU

     var processor: ProcessorType { get }

     var processorCount: Int { get }

}

Based on this, we can now define a couple of systems:

struct PowerMacG5: Computer {

     let processor = PowerPC()

     let processorCount = 2

}



struct Xbox360: Computer {

     let processor = PowerPC()

     let processorCount = 1

}



struct MacPro: Computer {

     let processor = X86()

     let processorCount = 1

}

Now that we have all this, we'd like to perform a computation on all PowerPC based computers. I.e. something like:

let powerComputers = [PowerMacG5(), Xbox360()]

However, what would be the type of this? We can't use the Computer protocol, as it contains associated types. However, the associated types for the PowerMacG5 and the Xbox360 are the same, so in terms of types, Swift ought to understand that those things are kinda similar. However, there's no way to (easily) express this in the type system; both PowerMacG5 and Xbox360 are not the correct types for the array:

// None of those work

let powerComputers: [PowerMacG5] = [PowerMacG5(), Xbox360]

let powerComputers: [Xbox360] = [PowerMacG5(), Xbox360]

let powerComputers: [Computer] = [PowerMacG5(), Xbox360]

Type erasure is a solution for this. The idea is to box the actual type into a generic wrapper so that Swift can coalesce around wrapper + type. The solution we're aiming for would look like this in the end:

let powerComputers: [AnyComputer<PowerPC>] = [AnyComputer(PowerMacG5()), AnyComputer(Xbox360())]

Now we would have our shared type, in this case it is AnyComputer<CPU>. Where does this mystic AnyComputer come from? We have to build it ourselves. This is a multi-step process, and requires quite a bit of boilerplate. We will start simple and expand step by step. This solution requires multiple types.