Splitting a Swift Sequence Into Head and Tail

Ole Begemann:

One possible solution is to create an iterator to read in the first element, and then wrap the current iterator state in a new AnySequence instance[…] This code works, but it’s not a nice generic solution, especially for types that also conform to Collection. Wrapping the tail in an AnySequence is a big performance killer, and you can’t use the affordances of a collection’s proper SubSequence type.

[…]

Dennis’s trick is to call Sequence.drop(while:), which preserves the SubSequence type for the tail, and then “catch” the first element inside the drop(while:) predicate closure using a captured local variable. Nicely done!

[…]

The code above targets Swift 4.2. It will break in Swift 5 because sequences will no longer have an associated SubSequence type, only collections (Swift Evolution proposal SE-0234).

iOS iOS 12 Mac macOS 10.14 Mojave Programming Swift Programming Language

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