Swift support

[fsproru]

Hi there,

Thanks for working on cedar! It's a great BDD framework for iOS.

Just curious, is Swift support on the horizon ?

Alex

[jeffh]

Hey @fsproru, thanks for the compliments!

Swift support is in discussion for Cedar, but there are a lot of challenges to tackle first:

• Swift doesn't have support for interop with Objective-C++
• It's easier to support Objective-C from Swift and not vice versa. Otherwise the Swift API suffers with implicit optionals
• Pulling in Swift would require Xcode 6 support. While it would be great to drop Xcode 5 support, there are still a lot of users of Xcode 5 at the moment.
• Swift doesn't support full reflection on dynamic dispatch for fakes, doubles, and spies to work.
• Swift syntax is still in flux

So it's on the (longer) horizon. If you're starting a new project in Swift, I'd recommend Quick for now. You'll also find me over there as well.

[fsproru]

Hey @jeffh, great explanation, thanks!

Our project started in Objective-C for variety of reasons. We're currently using cedar. Quick looks interesting, the syntax is very similar to cedar.

We'll start looking into swift later this fall. We'll cross that bridge when we get to it.

[thedanchez]

Hey @jeffh , just wanted to follow up on this after Swift officially went open source. Does that change anything with respect to adding this support in Cedar? -- specifically the support for full reflection on dynamic dispatch for fakes, doubles and spies to work. (or is this something that is more related to being in Quick?).

[tjarratt]

The biggest issue, as far as I see it, is that the support for interop with Objective-C++ still isn't in Swift.

It's possible to write tests with Cedar in swift, if you only expose the it, describe and context functions, but (afaik) there isn't a great way to use the test doubles and matchers that Cedar exposes in a pure swift context.

My current thinking is that it would be nice to be able to pull in just the Cedar runner as a dynamic framework for Swift. For assertions you could choose to use Nimble or even XCTest assertions.

There aren't any absolute plans right now to make Cedar's fakes and matchers usable from Swift. I'd love to learn of a way to make it work well, but so far I haven't seen anything in Swift that would make it possible.

[briancroom]

Following up on what @tjarratt was describing, I have just opened a PR for exposing the Cedar test runner to Swift (#367). I agree that making the matchers and doubles available would effectively require rewriting them given the current state of the tools.

@dsanc89 with respect to the feasibility of dynamically-generated test doubles for Swift objects, it continues to appear unlikely that such tools will be possible in the general case for the foreseeable future.

[tjarratt]

@fsproru @dsanc89 I'm going to close this issue for now, since we've just merged in @briancroom's PR to allow using the Cedar runner from Swift.

I'm going to continue thinking about Cedar's test doubles and how they fit into the big picture of testing with Swift, so I don't want this conversation to be over by any means. Please re-open this issue, or open new ones should anything change in the future re: reflection, Swift and dynamic dispatch that might make it feasible for Cedar to support Swift more fully.

[fsproru]

Thanks @tjarratt