What is Protocol Oriented Programming in Swift? What added value does it bring?

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Preface: POP and OOP are not mutually exclusive. They’re design paradigms that are greatly related.

The primary aspect of POP over OOP is that is prefers composition over inheritance. There are several benefits to this.

In large inheritance hierarchies, the ancestor classes tend to contain most of the (generalized) functionality, with the leaf subclasses making only minimal contributions. The issue here is that the ancestor classes end up doing a lot of things. For example, a Car drives, stores cargo, seats passengers, plays music, etc. These are many functionalities that are each quite distinct, but they all get indivisibly lumped into the Car class. Descendants of Car, such as Ferrari, Toyota, BMW, etc. all make minimal modifications to this base class.

The consequence of this is that there is reduced code reuse. My BoomBox also plays music, but it’s not a car. Inheriting the music-playing functionality from Car isn’t possible.

What Swift encourages instead is that these large monolithic classes be broken down into a composition of smaller components. These components can then be more easily reused. Both Car and BoomBox can use MusicPlayer.

Swift offers multiple features to achieve this, but the most important by far are protocol extensions. They allow implementation of a protocol to exist separate of its implementing class, so that many classes may simply implement this protocol and instantly gain its functionality.

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