How to get a reference to a parent/super class in Swift?

Question

In Swift you can create inheritance:

class A {

}

class B:A {

}

In this example B inherits from A. If I create a function within B is there a way I can get a reference to it's super class A? I was thinking it would be something like:

self.super

Or

self.super()

Or

self.parent

I tried all of these and none worked for me. Does anyone know how to get a reference to the super class?

Answer 1

A pure Swift version of this, that works on Linux, but relies on a not-quite-official API is:

class A {}
class B: A {}

let superclass = Swift._getSuperclass (B.self)
print ("\(superclass)")

Thanks to gwynne-raskind for the help!

Answer 2

You need to import the Objective-C runtime, and then you can use class_getSuperclass().

import ObjectiveC

class A {}

class B:A {
    func mySuper() -> AnyClass {
        return class_getSuperclass(self.dynamicType)
    }
}

B().mySuper() // A.Type

It is extremely unlikely that this is a good idea for anything other than debugging and logging. Even then, it is very un-Swiftlike, and you should deeply rethink your problem before pursuing it. Even subclassing like this is pretty un-Swiftlike. Protocols and extensions are almost always a better solution than inheritance in pure Swift (and without inheritance, there is no need to worry about superclasses).