Introduction

Even though Swift stresses strong types, compile time safety and static dispatch, it still offers a Reflection mechanism as part of the standard library.

Reflection means that you can ask Swift at runtime questions about types. I.e. you can tell Swift "what are the methods that this class implements"

This might not sound useful, but in reality is allows to do some really clever tricks: For example, you could write a function that takes any struct, lists all the properties (var username, var age, etc) and writes this information into Core Data.

Reflection in Swift is read-only, so you can't write any properties. However, it is still quite powerful. This guide will explain reflection and also show how it can be used in a practical way (the aforementioned struct to Core Data example).

The best understanding of the topic can be achieved by having a look at the API to see what it offers us.