Migrating Firefox for iOS to Swift 3.0
Mozilla (via Emily Toop):
A week ago we completed the migration of the entire Firefox for iOS project from Swift 2.3 to Swift 3.0. With over 206,000 lines of code, migrating a project of this size is no small feat. Xcode’s built in conversion tool is a fantastic help, but leaves your codebase in a completely uncompilable state that takes a good long while to resolve.
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The first hitch in the plan occurred fairly quickly. Our test targets, despite not importing code from other targets further down the dependency tree, all required our primary target, Client, as the host app in order to run. Therefore our plan to ensure each target robustly passed its tests before moving onto the next target was impossible. We would have to migrate all of the targets, then the test targets and then ensure that the tests pass. This would mean that we may possibly be performing code changes in dependent targets on incorrectly migrated code, which added an extra layer of uncertainty. In addition, being unable to execute the code before moving on would mean that if we made a poor decision when solving a migration issue, that decision may end up proliferating through many targets before we realised that the code change produces a crash.
The second hitch came when migrating some of the larger targets, in particular Storage. Even after all this time, Xcode’s ability to successfully compile Swift is…flaky. When, after performing the auto-conversion, your first build error is a segfault in Xcode, this is not at all helpful. Especially when the line of code mentioned in the segfault stack trace is in an unassuming class that is doing nothing special. And when you comment out all of the code in that class, it still produces a segfault.
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It had taken 3.5 engineers, 3 members of QA and 3.5 weeks, but the feeling when we were finally ready to hit merge was jubilant.
They ran into an interesting NSKeyedArchiver issue.
Previously: Getting to Swift 3 at Airbnb.
Update (2017-02-24): Thaddeus Ternes:
The Astra board didn’t change for over two weeks because of the Swift 3 migration. That was two weeks I didn’t get new features or enhancements built, or customer-reported issues fixed. I was simply agreeing to proposed changes by the tools, and then fixing the problems it created along the way.
