Point-Free is a video series exploring advanced topics in the Swift programming language, hosted by industry experts, Brandon and Stephen.
We dissect some of the most important and interesting topics in Swift programming frequently, and deliver them straight to your inbox.
We cover both abstract ideas and practical concepts you can start using in your code base immediately.
Download a fully-functioning Swift playground from the episode so you can experiment with the concepts discussed.
We transcribe each video by hand so you can search and reference easily. Click on a timestamp to jump directly to that point in the video.
We are going to take a Swift feature into the browser. We will set up a WebAssembly application from scratch, show how to run and debug it, and even set up some basic UI. And then we will integrate our existing model into it, all powered by the magic of Swift’s Observation framework.
It’s time to go cross-platform! We will take a feature written in Swift and use it in vastly different situations, including not only SwiftUI and UIKit, but beyond Apple’s frameworks and ecosystems. We will start with a baby step and introduce our feature to a third party view paradigm, Airbnb’s Epoxy.
We finish building a modern UIKit application with brand new state-driven tools, including a complex collection view that can navigate to two child features. And we will see that, thanks to our back-port of Swift’s observation tools, we will be able to deploy our app all the way back to iOS 13.
SQLite is one of the most well-crafted, battle-tested, widely-deployed pieces of software in history, and it’s a great fit for apps with more complex persistence needs than user defaults or a JSON file. Let’s get familiar with the library, starting with a crash course in interacting with C code from Swift.
We zoom out a bit to get a greater appreciation for how Equatable
and Hashable
are used throughout the greater language and ecosystem, including actors, standard library types, SwiftUI, and more.
We’ve studied Equatable
and Hashable
, their laws, and saw how value types as simple bags of data easily conform via “structural” equality. What about reference types? Reference types are an amalgamation of data and behavior, and that data can be mutated in place at any time, so how can they reasonably conform to these protocols?
SwiftUI is Apple’s declarative successor to UIKit and AppKit, and provides a wonderful set of tools for building applications quickly and effectively. It also provides a wonderful opportunity to explore problems around architecture and composition.
The Swift language has grown over the years and become more and more powerful. It now boosts a comprehensive static type system (generics, existentials…), a suite of concurrency tools (actors, dynamic isolation…), and most recently even ownership capabilities (consuming, borrowing, non-copyable types…). In “Back to basics” we will focus on just one part of the language in order to uncover the deep theory behind that feature as well as provide concrete advice for writing real-world code.
Architecture is a tough problem and there’s no shortage of articles, videos and open source projects attempting to solve the problem once and for all. In this collection we systematically develop an architecture from first principles, with an eye on building something that is composable, modular, testable, and more.
If you have ever created a binding using the get:set:
initializer, you may want to reconsider. Doing so can hurt SwiftUI’s ability to animate your view. Luckily there is a better way. You can leverage @dynamicMemberLookup
and subscripts to derive new bindings in a way that allows SwiftUI to propertly track where the binding came from.
You may have heard that “mocks are bad” and that they cause you to test the mock rather than your application’s actual feature. That doesn’t have to be the case. It is totally fine to mock a dependency to a system that you do not control, such as the file system. You do not need to test that saving and loading with that dependency works (after all, that’s the mocked behavior!), but you should test how your application behaves when it tries to load or save data. For example, is data saved after each change to your app’s data? Or, if loading data throws an error, do you show an alert to the user?
We often need to perform async work when there is no async context, such as in SwiftUI button action closures. In such cases it seems that you have no choice but to spin up an unstructured Task
, but you may have heard that doing so it bad. So what are you to do? Well, there is an easy answer…
Please stop releasing one amazing video after the other! I'm still at Episode 15! #pointfreemarathon #androiddevhere
Really love this episode - thanks @mbrandonw + @stephencelis! Understanding Swift types in terms of algebraic data types is such an elegant way of seeing the # of possible values your Swift types will represent 🤯 #Simplifyallthethings #GoodbyeComplexity
The best thing, that happened to me for a while. @mbrandonw and @stephencelis really provide a lot of new information according to #ios development and #functionalprogramming. All info could be used in real production without boring academics.
tfw you are excited for a 4 hour train ride because you'll have time to watch the new @pointfreeco episode 🤓🏔🚂 #MathInTheAlps #typehype
Through videos you constantly introduce ideas and patterns only to later reformulate them into more general ideas. This is awesome and helped me understand a lot of programming concepts. Well done!
@pointfreeco ❤️: Thank you! 🧠: … The brain can’t say anything. It is blown away (🤯)!
Their content pushes the boundary of my knowledge, and it's fun to watch!
I really love the dynamics of @pointfreeco. The dance of “this is super nice because…” “yes, BUT….”. they clearly show what’s good, what’s not so good and keep continuously improving.
This is surely one of the best shows for Swift folks out there! The content and explanation is at a really high bar!
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