Class And Structure in swift

Jitendra Kumar

31 August 2020

Class And Structure in swift are good choices for storing data and modeling behavior in your apps, but their similarities can make it difficult to choose one over the other.

Consider the following recommendations to help choose which option makes sense when adding a new data type to your app.

Structures use by default.
Classes use when you need Objective-C interoperability.
Add classes when you need to control the identity of the data you’re modeling.
Using structures along with protocols to adopt behavior by sharing implementations.

Class And Structure in swift are general-purpose, flexible constructs that become the building blocks of your program’s code. You define properties and methods to add functionality to your structures and classes using the same syntax you use to define constants, variables, and functions.

Comparing Structures and Classes

Structures and classes in Swift have many things in common. Both can:

Adding properties to store values
Methods Define to provide functionality
Subscripts Define to provide access to their values using subscript syntax
Define initializers to set up their initial state
Be extended to expand their functionality beyond a default implementation
Conform to protocols to provide standard functionality of a certain kind

Classes have additional capabilities that structures don’t have:

Inheritance enables one class to inherit the characteristics of another.
Typecasting enables you to check and interpret the type of a class instance at runtime.
Deinitializers enable an instance of a class to free up any resources it has assigned.
Reference counting allows more than one reference to a class instance

Since a class is a reference type and it supports inheritance, the complexity increases. In most cases, a struct should be enough to meet your needs. Use a class when they’re appropriate or necessary

Design Class

To demonstrate the difference between classes and structs, first design a class, HumanClass that has a name property.

class TestClass { 
 name: String init(name: String) {
self.name = name
 } 
}

class TestClass {

name: String init(name: String) {

self.name = name

}

Create Instance

var ClassObject = TestClass(name: "Bob")
ClassObject.name // "Bob"

1 2	var ClassObject = TestClass(name: "Bob") ClassObject.name // "Bob"

Create another instance that “copies” humanClassObject

let newClassObject = ClassObject

1	let newClassObject = ClassObject

Change the name property of newHumanClassObject to “Bobby”.

ClassObject.name = "Bobby" 
newClassObject.name // "Bobby"

1 2	ClassObject.name = "Bobby" newClassObject.name // "Bobby"

The name property of newHumanClassObject has been changed to “Bobby” as well.

Struct Design

Let us find out if the same behavior occurs with an object created with structs

struct TestStruct{ 
var name: String init(name: String) {
 self.name = name 
} 
}

struct TestStruct{

var name: String init(name: String) {

self.name = name

}

Create Instance

Create another instance that “copies” structObject

var structObject = TestStruct(name: "Bob") 
let newStructObject = structObject

1 2	var structObject = TestStruct(name: "Bob") let newStructObject = structObject

Change the name property of structObject to “Bobby”.

structObject.name = "Bobby" 
newStructObject.name // "Bob"

1 2	structObject.name = "Bobby" newStructObject.name // "Bob"

On the contrary, the change in the name property of structObject has no effect on newStructObject.name.

The graph below shows the fundamental difference between value types vs reference types.

Conclusion

Thanks for reading this blog, this will help you to add the class or structure in your project and You can know more from here.

So pls follow the above step and And if you have any issue or suggestion you can leave your message in the comment section I will try to solve this.