What’s the difference between Any and AnyObject?
Swift has two anonymous types: Any and AnyObject. They are subtly different, and you will need to use both sooner or later.
AnyObject refers to any instance of a class, and is equivalent to id in Objective-C. It’s useful when you specifically want to work with a reference type, because it won’t allow any of Swift’s structs or enums to be used. AnyObject is also used when you want to restrict a protocol so that it can be used only with classes.
Any refers to any instance of a class, struct, or enum – literally anything at all. You’ll see this in Swift wherever types are unknown or are mixed in ways that can be meaningfully categorized:
let values: [Any] = [1, 2, "Fish"]Ideally you should avoid both Any and AnyObject in your code – it’s better to be more specific if you can be.
Available from iOS 8.0 – learn more in my book Swift Design Patterns
Did this solution work for you? Please pass it on!
Other people are reading…
- What are protocol extensions?
- How to check whether a module is available using canImport()
- What is key-value observing?
- How to convert radians to degrees
- How to delay execution of code using the defer keyword
About the Swift Knowledge Base
This is part of the Swift Knowledge Base, a free, searchable collection of solutions for common iOS questions.
Learn Server-Side Swift now!
Take your Swift code to the server and become a full-stack developer with my latest book: Server-Side Swift!
