A bug with Swift shorthand arguments

20 Feb 2022 ⇐ Notes archive

(This is an entry in my technical notebook. There will likely be typos, mistakes, or wider logical leaps — the intent here is to “let others look over my shoulder while I figure things out.”)

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A common kickflip in The Browser Company’s codebase is merging two dictionaries. Take two groups of tabs, each keyed on tab IDs with a corresponding Tab instance for values.

(Gist permalink.)

When merging tabGroup1 and tabGroup2, we need to consider the possibility — albeit rare with UUIDs — of key collisions. Do we unique duplicate keys with an existing value in the dictionary? Overwrite it? Or compute some new value based on the two? Thankfully Swift provides an affordance to handle this with Dictionary.merging(_:uniquingKeysWith:)¹.

Since computing a new value for duplicate keys doesn’t quite make sense here, let’s try both keeping existing and overwriting values wholesale.

(Gist permalink.)

And that’s the note’s title bug in action. When using shorthand names, the last argument must be referenced or you have to fall back to naming or ignoring every argument (i.e. { first, _ in first } above).

The bug has been outstanding for six years (!) and folks like John McCall described it as an issue “several people have made efforts to fix” and “it’s not easy.” Yet, there was a call for next steps in a thread David James revived just last month.

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