Access Control in Swift

Since Swift was released at WWDC this year, Apple have clearly stated the language is still in beta. This was proven by the fact that the last release, beta 4, introduced a new feature, “Access Control.” Initially when Swift was released, this did seem like a glaring omission as almost every modern programming language today has some notion of Access Control.

3 levels

Swift has 3 levels of Access Control.

1. private - Access from only the same file
2. internal - Access from the same module
3. public - Across modules

Let’s start with private the most restrictive one. This will stop anybody accessing anything that is not in the same file.

For example, if I had a Person class with a name variable that were private, nobody else outside the file would be able to access it.

So in Person.swift

class Person {
    private let name: String
    
    init(name: String) {
        self.name = name
    }
}

And in main.swift

let person = Person(name: "John")
println(person.name) // compile error 

Removing the private keyword from the variable, removes the compile error.

So again in Person.swift

class Person {
    let name: String
    
    init(name: String) {
        self.name = name
    }
}

In main.swift

let person = Person(name: "John")
println(person.name) // prints out John

##Internal

So when we removed the private keyword from our Person.swift class it had internal scope by default. This is the same as adding the internal keyword to the attribute.

In Person.swift

class Person {
    internal let name: String
    
    init(name: String) {
        self.name = name
    }
}

##Public Lastly, public should be used with modules and when exposing APIs. So if you want your functions/attributes to be accessible across modules, then use the public.

Summary

I hope you’ve learnt something about Swift’s access controls in this post. Here are some references for further reading.

• https://developer.apple.com/swift/blog/?id=5
• https://developer.apple.com/swift/

The source code for this post can be found here https://github.com/codingricky/Swift-Access-Control-Demo.