Flatbuffers swift roadmap

[mustiikhalil]

This discussion will have all the features and the roadmap for supporting them in the swift implemetation. However, none of these are 100% going to be implemented.

Current working on

• flexbuffers
  • add null support
  • Readers
  • Ensure space properly
  • Verifier
  • Encoder/Decoder API for Swift objects
  • Check what we missed from the API’s

Pipeline:

• Support for gRPC 2.0 (swift-gRPC).
• Support Windows (currently works but without gRPC support)
• Reflection (mini reflection too?) + More of a Hopeful feature
• Refactor cpp generator for swift
• Since we are using swift 5.9, we can introduce the concept of ownership which is a huge plus (it would be a bit rust like in some points)
• Nested arrays within structs with swift 6.1 in the pipelines we will hopefully be able to support an array of values within a Struct since its going to be able to read directly from memory since SwiftLang is introducing the concept of FixedArrays.

Stale

• Any New flatbuffers 2.0 features
• JSON Decoding (without object API) [Swift] Json decoder #6888 (stale)

DONE

• Storing maps / dictionaries in a FlatBuffer (supported)
• Optional Scalars (supported)
• Verifier [Swift] Verifier implementation #6373 (supported)
• Default vectors and strings [Swift] adds support for default vectors and strings #6461 (supported)
• Allow string unions in swift [Swift] Implements union strings #6589 (supported)
• Final release for gRPC support. (Depends on grpc-swift) (completed)
• xcode 13 documentation Update swift doc xcode 13 #6784 (completed)
• JSON encoding (without object API) Adds JSON encoding to swift #6874 (completed)
• Moving to this Benchmarks package [Swift] Migrating benchmarks to a newer lib. #8168 (completed)

[mustiikhalil]

@liuliu so we can track the issues here

[liuliu]

Thanks!

[mustiikhalil]

if you have anything (official) to add please do make a list and i will add it to the list.