Default equality operator for objects in Swift

Question

When using find to search the index of an object in a array:

var index = find(Store.allItems, myItem)

The compiler says that the Item class does not conform to protocol Equatable.

My Item class is an object, so in my opinion, coming from C#, the default equality comparer should be reference equality.

In Swift, It seems that you need to specify Equatable on each reference-type in order for find to work.
Also, you need to imlement the == operator so that it uses === to compare references:

func ==(a:Item, b:Item) -> Bool {
    return a === b
}

Moreover, this last declaration must be top-level code, which disgust me...

I tried writing:

func ==(a:AnyObject, b:AnyObject) -> Bool {
    return a === b
}

but it seems not to work.

Is there some faster and more elegant way to achieve standard equality comparing for objects?

Answer 1

Just try to make Item class conforming to Equatable:

extension Item:Equatable { }
func ==(lhs:Item, rhs:Item) -> Bool {
    return lhs === rhs
}