How do I add different types conforming to a protocol with an associated type to a collection?

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Protocols with type aliases cannot be used this way. Swift doesn’t have a way to talk directly about meta-types like ValidationRule or Array. You can only deal with instantiations like ValidationRule where... or Array<String>. With typealiases, there’s no way to get there directly. So we have to get there indirectly with type erasure.

Swift has several type-erasers. AnySequence, AnyGenerator, AnyForwardIndex, etc. These are generic versions of protocols. We can build our own AnyValidationRule:

struct AnyValidationRule<InputType>: ValidationRule {
    private let validator: (InputType) -> Bool
    init<Base: ValidationRule where Base.InputType == InputType>(_ base: Base) {
        validator = base.validate
    }
    func validate(input: InputType) -> Bool { return validator(input) }
}

The deep magic here is validator. It’s possible that there’s some other way to do type erasure without a closure, but that’s the best way I know. (I also hate the fact that Swift cannot handle validate being a closure property. In Swift, property getters aren’t proper methods. So you need the extra indirection layer of validator.)

With that in place, you can make the kinds of arrays you wanted:

let len = ValidationRuleLength()
len.validate("stuff")

let cond = ValidationRuleCondition<String>()
cond.validate("otherstuff")

let rules = [AnyValidationRule(len), AnyValidationRule(cond)]
let passed = rules.reduce(true) { $0 && $1.validate("combined") }

Note that type erasure doesn’t throw away type safety. It just “erases” a layer of implementation detail. AnyValidationRule<String> is still different from AnyValidationRule<Int>, so this will fail:

let len = ValidationRuleLength()
let condInt = ValidationRuleCondition<Int>()
let badRules = [AnyValidationRule(len), AnyValidationRule(condInt)]
// error: type of expression is ambiguous without more context

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