Swift frameworks with conflicting symbols in Objective-C apps

What happens when an Objective-C app includes two or more Swift frameworks that happen to have a conflicting class name? Frustration.

Swift rightfully doesn’t encourage the use of namespace prefixes, meaning this frustration will become increasingly common as more Swift frameworks are open-sourced and used in Objective-C apps.

Let’s see a concrete example of the problem and how we can minimize its likelihood.

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The problem

Consider the following pair of frameworks:

// Within Framework1.framework
@objc public class SomeManager: NSObject {
  public func doThing() {
    NSLog(@"SomeManager - Swift - Framework1");
  }
}

// Within Framework2.framework
@objc public class SomeManager: NSObject {
  public func doThing() {
    NSLog(@"SomeManager - Swift - Framework2");
  }
}

We might find the following code in an app that includes both frameworks:

SomeManager *instance = [SomeManager new];
[instance doThing];

Can you guess which class is instantiated? Not likely, because the answer is undefined. The linker will map an arbitrary implementation to the class each time the app is rebuilt.

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Namespace prefixing

Barring an Objective-C language feature that allows for the distinction of symbols by framework, we need to do the next-best thing: namespace prefixing.

Prefixing Objective-C classes is such a common practice that it’s automatic for most Objective-C developers. Software designers new to programming and learning Swift may not be familiar with this however, so in short:

Namespace prefixing is the practice of adding a three or four letter prefix (Apple has reserved two-letter prefixes) to the beginning of a symbol exposed by your framework. For example: if your company’s name was Lumi you might use LUMI as your prefix. LUMISomeClass, LUMISomeFunc, or LUMISomeStruct would all be examples of symbol names in your framework.

Swift rightfully doesn’t encourage the use of namespace prefixes because frameworks are the namespace. But Objective-C will treat Swift frameworks like any old Objective-C framework and so that namespacing is lost. Thankfully, Swift provides @objc(name).

@objc(name) allows you to provide an Objective-C-specific name for a class to be used only from Objective-C code. If we modify our original example:

// Within Framework1.framework
@objc(FW1SomeManager) public class SomeManager: NSObject {
  public func doThing() {
    NSLog(@"SomeManager - Swift - Framework1");
  }
}

// Within Framework2.framework
@objc(FW2SomeManager) public class SomeManager: NSObject {
  public func doThing() {
    NSLog(@"SomeManager - Swift - Framework2");
  }
}

These classes would be referred to in Objective-C as FW1SomeManager and FW2SomeManager while Swift code could still use SomeManager and Framework1.SomeManager as before - win win!

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Concluding notes

When writing Swift frameworks that may used by Objective-C apps, prefix your Swift class and struct names using @objc(). Not doing so in a shared or open source framework can lead to undefined behavior in the event of naming conflicts.

Note that @objc() not presently allow you to provide an Objective-C name for enum types.

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llvm feature request

In the absence of prefixed Swift symbols, a linker warning would be a helpful tool for identifying situations where the linker had to choose between duplicate symbols. Sadly, I could not find any such linker warning. This would be a welcome addition to llvm so I’ve filed a feature request.

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In exploring solutions to this problem I found out that you can refer to a specific Swift framework class using NSClassFromString.

Disclaimer: I do not encourage the use of this fact in a production application.

For example, NSClassFromString(@"Framework2.SomeManager") allows you to instantiate Framework2’s SomeManager. This approach can’t be checked at compile-time and may be subject to changes in future Swift releases, so its utility is limited. This does not work for Objective-C classes contained within frameworks.

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References

@featherless: You can namespace classes in Objective-C only with @ objc(ABCMyClass)
— Scott Berrevoets (@ScottBerrevoets) October 6, 2015

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