Property Delegates and the diligent community

The Property Delegates proposal has been in review for some days by now and is a good example of the strength of the Swift community.

This is a feature that many of us have followed for years, its previous incarnation called Property Behaviours.

The idea is to have a really nice way to change the behaviour of properties, to make them much more than just storage with a getter and setter. It also implies that we can generalise some scenarios that right now are hardcoded in the compiler (like lazy) which is always a good sign.

But the greatnesses of the feature itself is not the point I want to make in this post.

I recently made a video about the proposal because I was so excited about it. Luckily for us, even with an amazing proposal and feature, we have really smart people on the community that knows exactly how to challenge some assumptions. That is exactly what’s going on right now with SE-0258.

Everybody is excited and wants to see this feature in the language, but that doesn’t blind the community, we’re still able to provide useful feedback and keep searching for the best solution we can come up with.

Some people complains that Swift changes too much or that is really complicated, others think that it goes too slowly and lacks basic features. But I honestly think that the language is in the right path, improving and evolution at a steady pace with really bright people behind it.

Every release is a day to celebrate, and meanwhile I can still enjoy the language as it is every day.