turing complete with a stack of 0xdeadbeef
A recent post from Tom Harrington explores the issues with optional and non-optional values in Core Data regarding how the framework interacts with Swift. It’s a good overview. You should read it. The post shares some workarounds to improve the situation, but I want to share how I solve these issues in a more robust way.
I recently had an incredible experience with one of my open source projects that I’d like to share. It’s a story of openness and collaboration that I hope other open source project maintainers will find valuable. This post continues the theme of “building successful open source projects” from my previous article on documentation.
I recently gave a talk at the Swift Language User Group (#SLUG) meetup at Realm in San Francisco. A video of the talk is now online over at Realm’s blog, where it is synced up with my slides. If you haven’t already seen it, go check it out! Realm does an absolutely amazing job with posting these meetup talks — in addition to the video and slides, there’s a full transcript and subtitles.
As I continue my work with Core Data and Swift, I have been trying to find ways to make Core Data better. Among my goals are clarity and safety, specifically regarding types. Luckily, we can harness Swift’s optionals, enums, and other features to make managed objects more robust and more clear. But even with the improvements that Swift brings, there are still some drawbacks and limitations with Xcode’s current toolset.
Core Data is probably loved as much as it is shunned by iOS developers. It is a framework of great power that often comes with great frustration. But it remains a popular tool among developers despite its pitfalls — likely because Apple continues to invest in it and encourages its adoption, as well as the availability of the many open-source libraries that make Core Data easier to use. Consider unit testing, and Core Data gets a bit more cumbersome. Luckily, there are established techniques to facilitate testing your models. Add Swift to this equation, and the learning curve gets slightly steeper.