PhantomTypes

A phantom type is a custom type that has one or more unused type parameters.

Phantom types allow you to enforce type-safety without sacrificing readability. It also reduces the amount of tests we need to write because silly mistakes are forbidden by the compiler.

If you’re keen to know more, I recommend you read my medium article.

Example

Consider we have a User object like this…

struct User {
  var email: Email = ""
  var name: Name = ""
  var age: Age = 18
  var isAdmin: IsAdmin = false
}

If a developer tries to set a name value to the email property we will get a type-mismatch error from the compiler.

How can we enforce type-safety?

enum Types {
  enum Email {}
  enum Name {}
  enum Age {}
  enum IsAdmin {}
}

typealias Email = Phantom<Types.Email, String>
typealias Name = Phantom<Types.Name, String>
typealias Age = Phantom<Types.Age, Int>
typealias Location = Phantom<Types.IsAdmin, Bool>

Adding even more context

We might even consider making them even more explicit, so a User‘s email can’t be assigned to another Email field in the code, such as the Login email

protocol EmailHaving {}
extension EmailHaving {
  typealias Email = Phantom<Phantom<Self, Types.Email>, String>
}
extension User: EmailHaving {}
extension Login: EmailHaving {}

User().email = Login().email // type-mismatch error!

GitHub

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