Overloading Custom Operators in Swift

Dot Product Precedence

Your new dot-product doesn’t really fit into any of these categories. It has to be less than addition (as you realized before), but does it really fit into CastingPrecedence or RangeFormationPrecedence?

Instead, you are going to make your own precedence group for your dot-product operator.

Replace your original declaration of the • operator with the following:

precedencegroup DotProductPrecedence {
  lowerThan: AdditionPrecedence
  associativity: left
}

infix operator •: DotProductPrecedence

Here, you create a new precedence group and name it DotProductPrecedence. You place it lower than AdditionPrecedence because you want addition to take precedence. You also make it left-associative because you want it evaluated from left-to-right as you do in addition and multiplication. Then you assign this new precedence group to your • operator.

Your old line of code now runs and returns as expected:

vectorA • vectorB + vectorA // 29

Congratulations — you've mastered custom operators!

Where to Go From Here?

You can download the completed version of the playground using the Download Materials button at the top or bottom of this tutorial.

At this point, you know how to bend Swift operators to your needs. In this tutorial, you focused on using operators in a mathematical context. In practice, you’ll find many more ways to use operators.

A great demonstration of custom operator usage can be seen in the ReactiveSwift framework. One example is <~ for binding, an important function in reactive programming. Here is an example of this operator in use:

let (signal, _) = Signal<Int, Never>.pipe()
let property = MutableProperty(0)
property.producer.startWithValues {
  print("Property received \($0)")
}

property <~ signal

Cartography is another framework that heavily uses operator overloading. This AutoLayout tool overloads the equality and comparison operators to make NSLayoutConstraint creation simpler:

constrain(view1, view2) { view1, view2 in
  view1.width   == (view1.superview!.width - 50) * 0.5
  view2.width   == view1.width - 50
  view1.height  == 40
  view2.height  == view1.height
  view1.centerX == view1.superview!.centerX
  view2.centerX == view1.centerX

  view1.top >= view1.superview!.top + 20
  view2.top == view1.bottom + 20
}

Additionally, you can always reference the official custom operator documentation from Apple.

Armed with these new sources of inspiration, you can go out into the world and make your code simpler with operator overloading. Just be careful not to go too crazy with custom operators! :]

If you have any questions or comments on this tutorial, please join the discussion below!