In Swift, can you find all types in a module that adhere to a specific protocol?

Question

In Swift 4, is it possible to find all types within the current module which adhere to a specific protocol?

For instance, say I've defined this protocol and these classes:

protocol Animal{}
protocol Vehicle{}
protocol Favorite{}

class Dog : Animal{
}

class Cat : Animal, Favorite{
}

class Car : Vehicle{
}

class Bicycle : Vehicle, Favorite{
}

I want to find all types that implement Favorite. This can be easily done in C#, but I’m not sure if you can in Swift.

• Cat
• Bicycle

If it helps, I'm using Swift 4.

Answer 1

I don't believe Swift currently has a 'native' (not dependant on the Objective-C runtime) API for doing this kind of reflection.

However, if you're on an Apple platform (and therefore have Obj-C interoperability), you could get a list of all classes registered with the Obj-C runtime, and then filter those that conform to a given protocol. This will work for Swift classes (even those that don't inherit from NSObject) because under the hood Swift classes are built on top of Obj-C classes (when there's Obj-C interop).

Because this will only work for classes (not structures or enumerations), you may want to restrict your protocol such that only classes can conform to it:

protocol Favorite : class {}

You can then do the following, using objc_copyClassList:

import Foundation

protocol Animal {}
protocol Vehicle {}
protocol Favorite : class {}

class Dog : Animal {}
class Cat : Animal, Favorite {}
class Car : Vehicle {}
class Bicycle : Vehicle, Favorite {}

/// Invokes a given closure with a buffer containing all metaclasses known to the Obj-C
/// runtime. The buffer is only valid for the duration of the closure call.
func withAllClasses<R>(
  _ body: (UnsafeBufferPointer<AnyClass>) throws -> R
) rethrows -> R {

  var count: UInt32 = 0
  let classListPtr = objc_copyClassList(&count)
  defer {
    free(UnsafeMutableRawPointer(classListPtr))
  }
  let classListBuffer = UnsafeBufferPointer(
    start: classListPtr, count: Int(count)
  )

  return try body(classListBuffer)
}
//                               .flatMap in Swift < 4.1
let classes = withAllClasses { $0.compactMap { $0 as? Favorite.Type } }
print(classes) // [Bicycle, Cat]

Here we're calling compactMap(_:) on the UnsafeBufferPointer to get back an array of metatypes that represent types conforming to Favorite (i.e those that can be cast to the existential metatype Favorite.Type).