Distinction in Swift between uppercase "Self" and lowercase "self"

Question

While playing in a Swift playground I noticed that Self, with capital "S", is available along with the lowercase self. Is there any difference between them? If so, what are usages for these two, especially for Self?

Answer 1

Self refers to the type of the current "thing" inside of a protocol (whatever is conforming to the protocol). For an example of its use, see Protocol func returning Self.

The official docs I've found for Self is in Protocol Associated Type Declaration in The Swift Programming Language. It surprisingly is not documented in the sections on protocols or on nested types:

However, now there is a paragraph about Self Type including a code example in the official Swift Programming Language's chapter about Types

Answer 2

Self can also be used in classes, and is useful. Here is an article about it.

Here is an example. You have a class called MyClass. MyClass have methods returning instances of it. Now you add a subclass of MyClass called MySubclass. You want these methods to return instances of MySubclass instead of MyClass. The following code shows how to do it. Note that the methods can be either instance methods or class methods.

class MyClass: CustomStringConvertible {      let text: String      // Use required to ensure subclasses also have this init method     required init(text: String) {         self.text = text     }      class func create() -> Self {         return self.init(text: "Created")     }      func modify() -> Self {         return type(of: self).init(text: "modifid: " + text)     }      var description: String {         return text     }  }  class MySubclass: MyClass {     required init(text: String) {         super.init(text: "MySubclass " + text)     } }  let myClass = MyClass.create() let myClassModified = myClass.modify()  let mySubclass = MySubclass.create() let mySubclassModified = mySubclass.modify()  print(myClass) print(myClassModified) print(mySubclass) print(mySubclassModified) 

The following line printed out:

// Created // modifid: Created // MySubclass Created // MySubclass modifid: MySubclass Created