Wednesday, October 5, 2016

Swift 3.0 Unsafe World

Roberto Perez (via Hacker News):

But, what if we want to take a pointer to a Swift managed memory without having to create a function? To do it we will use withUnsafeMutablePointer, that will take a reference to a Swift type and a block with the pointer as it’s parameter.

[…]

When dealing with C API you need sometimes to cast pointers to struct to a different struct. This is very easy to do en C (and very dangerous and error prone too), as you have seen in Swift, all pointers are typed, that means that an UnsafePointer<Int> cannot be used where an UnsafePointer<UInt8> is required, that’s good in terms of producing a safer code, but at the same time that makes not possible to interact with C APIs that requires this types of casts, like for example socket bind() function. For theses cases, we will use withMemoryRebound which is a function that will convert a pointer from a type to a different one.

[…]

Before Swift 3.0, you could do it with UnsafePointer<Void> however, in 3.0 a new type has been added to handle these types of pointers: UnsafeRawPointer. This struct is not generic, so it means that it won’t hold information tied to any specific type and that will simplifly our code.

[…]

If we construct a UnsafeBufferPointer from an UnsafePointer we will be able to use most of the array functions of native Swift type given that UnsafeBufferPointer implements Collection, Indexable and RandomAccessCollection swift protocols.

[…]

Swift has an utility to take pointers to objects retaining its reference or not depending on our needs. Those are static functions of Unmanaged struct. With passRetained() we will create a retained reference to an object, so we can be sure that when using it from C world, it will be still there. If the object is already retained for the life of the callback we can also use passUnretained(). Both methods produces a instance of Unmanaged that will be converted to a UnsafeRawPointer by calling toOpaque()

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