Make Your Types Equatable

The first solution for the archetypical problem is also a really simple one. Instead of enforcing Equatable on your custom protocol, you can simply require your full fledged, final, types to conform to the Equatable protocol instead of your custom protocol. Consider the previously defined Bookmarkable protocol:

protocol Bookmarkable {

}



struct Bookmark: Bookmarkable, Equatable {

   var identifier: Int

}



func ==(lhs: Bookmark, rhs: Bookmark) -> Bool {

   return lhs.identifier == rhs.identifier

}



var myBookmarks: [Bookmark] = []

In the example above, the Equatable requirement actually stems from the Bookmark type conforming to the Equatable protocol, not the Bookmarkable protocol itself. The actual Equatable information, however, lies in the new identifier property, which has been added to the Bookmark struct. As you can easily see, this also requires you to make the myBookmarks array require only elements of type Bookmark. A serious disgression if you're used to using protocols like partially anonymous types. A better solution, if your design allows for it, goes one step further by enforcing the new property which we introduced in this example.

Equatable Properties

Here, the idea is that we take one of the types that already implement Equatable in a proper way (i.e. Int, String, ...) and add a new property requirement to our Bookmarkable protocol. Then, we can use this property to add Equatable support without actually implementing Equatable:

protocol Bookmarkable {

     var identifier: Int { get }

}



struct Bookmark: Bookmarkable {

     var identifier: Int

}



var myBookmarks: [Bookmarkable] = []

The main change, compared to the code above, is that the var identifier moved to the Bookmarkable protocol and that we removed the func ==.

While this works better, it still has a major deficit. Since Bookmarkable does not directly comply with Equatable, you will not gain the standard library's methods that specifically deal with Equatable types. So instead of being able to call Array.contains like this:

let ourBookmark = Bookmark(identifier: 0)

let result = myBookmarks.contains(ourBookmark)

You will have to use the more verbose closure-based version:

let ourBookmark = Bookmark(identifier: 0)



let result = myBookmarks.contains { (bookmark) -> Bool in

     return bookmark.identifier == ourBookmark.identifier

}