Building on Auto Layout
It is common to use
addConstraintdirectly, but Auto Layout is actually a great engine to build layout systems on top of. In this post I’ll talk about different abstraction layers on Auto Layout and show its advantages with my library StackLayout.[…]
The simplest way we can build on Auto Layout is a thin syntactic layer for creating constraints that we still manage manually. Until iOS 9, the built-in way to create a constraint was quite verbose.
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Higher up the abstraction scale is the Visual Format Language. When I interned at Apple on the Cocoa Frameworks team I helped with the initial implementation of Auto Layout and especially on the parser for the VFL. This lets you specify a few common layouts that can be written as ascii art.
I’ve experimented by reimplementing some of it in Swift using operator overloading. The idea is the same, but has the advantage of compile-time checking.
