Summary: Classes
Updated for Xcode 13.3
Classes aren’t quite as commonly used as structs, but they serve an invaluable purpose for sharing data, and if you ever choose to learn Apple’s older UIKit framework you’ll find yourself using them extensively.
Let’s recap what we learned:
- Classes have lots of things in common with structs, including the ability to have properties and methods, but there are five key differences between classes and structs.
- First, classes can inherit from other classes, which means they get access to the properties and methods of their parent class. You can optionally override methods in child classes if you want, or mark a class as being
finalto stop others subclassing it. - Second, Swift doesn’t generate a memberwise initializer for classes, so you need to do it yourself. If a subclass has its own initializer, it must always call the parent class’s initializer at some point.
- Third, if you create a class instance then take copies of it, all those copies point back to the same instance. This means changing some data in one of the copies changes them all.
- Fourth, classes can have deinitializers that run when the last copy of one instance is destroyed.
- Finally, variable properties inside class instances can be changed regardless of whether the instance itself was created as variable.
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