What is the advantage of a lazy var in Swift

Question

What is the advantage or difference of initializing:

lazy var hintView: HintView = {         let hintView = HintView()         return hintView }() 

Instead of simply use:

var hintView = HintView() 

(HintView is: class HintView: UIView {})

Help is very appreciated.

Answer 1

Let's do it practically. See the screenshot

I just stopped the debugger in viewDidLoad. You can see that secondHintView has a memory as it was not lazy for the storage but hintView is still nil as it is a lazy one. The memory gets allocated once you use/access the lazy variables.

Also lazy should be var always.