Weakable

Weakable is an easy way to hold weak references in Swift.

With Weakable you can create weak arrays, weak dictionaries and many other cool things.

😎

Requirements

• iOS 9+
• watchOS 3+
• tvOS 9+
• macOS 10.11+
• Swift 3.3+

Usage

Declare your Weak variable in one of the two ways provided:

//Given a class
class TestClass {}
//and an instance of that class
var aTestObject = TestClass()

//You can create a Weak like this:
var weakTestObject = Weak(aTestObject)

//Or using the shorthand operator ≈
var anotherWeakTestObject = ≈test

Access your variable:

weakTestObject.object //returns your value as an optional, since it may or may not have been released

Operators

Weakable comes with 3 operators, all using the ≈ character (⌥ + x).

• prefix ≈
  • Shorthand contructor for a Weak variable:

//Given an object
let object = AwesomeClass()

//you can create a Weak by either
var weakObject = Weak(object)

//or
var weakObject = ≈object

• postfix operator ≈
  • Shorthand accessor for Weak:

//Given a Weak
var weakObject = ≈object

//you can access the underlying object by
weakObject.object

//or
weakObject≈

• infix operator ≈
  • Shorthand assignment for Weak:

//Given a Weak
var weakObject = ≈object

//you can change the underlying object by
weakObject.object = anotherObject

//or
weakObject ≈ anotherObject

Arrays and Dictionaries

You can safely store your Weak variables in collections (eg. [Weak<TestClass>]). The underlaying objects won’t be retained.

var tests = (1...10).map { TestClass() } // 10 elements
var weakTests = tests.map { ≈$0 } // 10 elements

tests.removeLast() // `tests` now have 9 elements, but `weakTests` have 10

weakTests = weakTests.filterWeaks() // `weakTests` now have 9 elements too, since we dropped the released objects from it

You can also quickly “unwrap” the elements in a Weak collection:

let tests = weakTests.compactWeaks()

The variable tests will now be a [TestClass] containing only the elements that haven’t been released yet.

Installation

Cocoapods

pod 'Weakable', '~> 1.0'

Then import Weakable where needed.

Carthage

github "BellAppLab/Weakable" ~> 1.0

Then import Weakable where needed.

Swift Package Manager

dependencies: [
    .package(url: "https://github.com/BellAppLab/Weakable", from: "1.0")
]

Then import Weakable where needed.

Git Submodules

cd toYourProjectsFolder
git submodule add -b submodule --name Weakable https://github.com/BellAppLab/Weakable.git

Then drag the Weakable folder into your Xcode project.

Author

Bell App Lab, apps@bellapplab.com

Credits

Logo image by Артур Абт from The Noun Project

License

Weakable is available under the MIT license. See the LICENSE file for more info.