Since I complained yesterday about Swift’s lack of a counterpart to Objective C’s #warning directive, folks have been in touch to encourage another solution to this problem. I could take advantage of Xcode’s standardized, built-in support for text-based comments such as “// FIXME” and “// TODO”. Using this notation causes the affected source lines to show up in Xcode’s per-file function popup, and other folks affected by the issue I describe above have added scripted build phases to emit text that Xcode will treat as a warning for each of these lines.

I initially dismissed the solution out of hand, because I anticipated that searching all of my sources with every build would be excessive. I’m kind of a stickler for fast build times because I like to do quick iterations when writing and testing code. My largest source base, MarsEdit, is big but not huge. But, appreciating that computers and SSDs are fast, I decided to test the straightforward script linked above to see how much time it would add to each of my build iterations. On average, it’s about 1.2s per build. It doesn’t sound like much, but personally that would nag at me. I’ve made a fuss over build phase speeds in the past, and reported bugs against unnecessary slowdowns in Apple’s standard build phases.

Zev Eisenberg suggested on Twitter that the use of specialized search tools such as the_silver_searcher might help. It’s true, it might, but then I’d be going down a path of installing custom software, writing custom scripts, all to accommodate what is a very useful feature that I personally still believe should be built in to the language. Or, at the very least, the language’s feature set should accommodate efficiently extending it to support something like #warning.

We’ll see where things go. I may yet end up adopting a convoluted (to my mind) approach involving expensive, redundant build phase script that scans my entire source base with every build, but more likely I’ll keep scratching my head while using the one-line, inline hack that I previously described.