I’ve been tackling more and more of my coding challenges in Swift, recently. I’ve run into a number of hangups. Some attributable to the learning curve, some to bugs in Swift or Xcode, and some to features I’ve grown to love in clang and Objective C which are simply not present in Swift.

For years, I’ve been in the habit of tagging my in-progress code with “artificial warnings.” While working in code, if a concern crosses my mind, the easiest way to make sure I won’t ship the software without addressing that concern is to add it directly to the code:

#warning Step through this in a debugger and confirm it still works...

Or:

#warning This isn't implemented yet, need to handle XYZ...

These warnings serve as an active reminder of things to fix while I’m working in Xcode, since they show up in the build navigator, and are illuminated in the source code while stepping through with the debugger. And because of my strict “no warnings” policy for shipping code, they are guaranteed to show up as errors in any Release build, thus thwarting an accidental shipment of code that is known to need further refinement.

I don’t think Swift supports anything like the “#warning” preprocessor directive.

The closest I’ve come to matching this behavior is a trick that employs Swift’s willingness to emit a warning for unreachable code:

if false { "in lieu of #warning, this will do" }

Unfortunately, it only shows up in the issue navigator as “Will never be executed,” and doesn’t show the specific warning text contained in the string. But at least as soon as click on the warning, I am reminded of the concern at hand.

I don’t know if the Swift team is philosophically opposed to implementing support for #warning, or something like it. I filed an enhancement request with the Swift project. In the meantime, if false { “life goes on.” }.

Update: Many folks have suggested a build-phase script to tag warnings. I wrote more about that option in a followup post.