Introduction

Tuples are one of Swift's less visible language features. They occupy a small space between Structs and Arrays. In addition, there's no comparable construct in Objective-C (or many other languages). Finally, the usage of tuples in the standard library and in Apple's example code is sparse. One could get the impression that their raison d'être in Swift is pattern matching, but we disgress.

Most tuple explanations concentrate on three tuple use cases (pattern matching, return values, destructuring) and leave it at that. The following guide tries to give a more comprehensive overview of tuples with best practices of when to use them and when not to use them.