Discover CollectionOfOne

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I want to show you a pretty interesting type in Swift called CollectionOfOne!

Let’s see when this type can be useful…

You’ve probably been in the situation where you had to wrap a single value into an Array, just to make your code work.

And you might have thought that, even though it wasn’t a big deal, it still felt a bit inefficient.

As it turns out, Swift actually has a special type just for this kind of situation.

So instead of wrapping the single value in an Array, you can wrap it into a CollectionOfOne.

Under the hood CollectionOfOne is just a simple variable that also conforms to the protocol Collection.

Which means that it’s a Collection that can contain exactly one value, hence the name CollectionOfOne.

Most of the time, the performance of your code will still be pretty much the same, whether you use an Array or a CollectionOfOne.

However, if your code is inside a tight loop with a big number of iterations, then you might get better performances when using CollectionOfOne.

That’s all for this article, I hope you’ve enjoyed it!

Here’s the code if you want to experiment with it:

import Foundation

let someNumbers = [1, 2, 3]
let moreNumbers = someNumbers + CollectionOfOne(4)