Swift Algorithm Club: March 2017 Digest
Check out the latest news from the Swift Algorithm Club, including a new Swift algorithm, and an upcoming Swift Algorithms workshop! By Kelvin Lau.
The Swift Algorithm Club is a popular open source project to implement popular algorithms and data structures in Swift, with over 11,000 stars on GitHub.
We periodically give status updates with how things are going with the project. This month’s update contains four big pieces of news:
- New Contribution: Swift QuadTree
- Swift 3 Migration Complete!
- New Co-Maintainer
- Swift Algorithm Club Workshop at RWDevCon!
Let’s dive in.
New Contribution: Swift QuadTree
In addition to a few dozen great fixes and minor updates from our community, we also have a new writeup by Timur Galimov: a Swift QuadTree.
Consider the following problem: your need to store a number of points (each point is a pair of X and Y coordinates) and then you need to answer which points lie in a certain rectangular region. A naive solution would be to store the points inside an array and then iterate over the points and check each one individually. This solution runs in O(n) though!
You can check out the full implementation and discussion here:
Swift 3 Migration Complete!
Over the past few months, we’ve been working hard to convert all 100+ data structures and algorithms in our repository to Swift 3.
Good news – I’m happy to announce that we’ve now finally finished, and now the repository is fully converted to Swift 3!
This represents a collaborative effort of over 100 algorithmic contributors, and I’m incredibly grateful to everyone who helped make this happen. Congratulations, all! :D
New Co-Maintainer
Next, I’m happy to announce that Ross O’Brien is joining the SAC team. Ross will be helping us with GitHub code reviews and will join the monthly write-ups for the various data structures and algorithms.
You’ll be seeing Ross around on the repository and helping everyone with their issues and pull requests. Please help me give a warm welcome to Ross! :]
Swift Algorithm Club Workshop at RWDevCon!
Ever wanted to learn about Swift Algorithms in person? Well, now’s your chance!
I am happy to announce that Vincent and I will be running an official Swift Algorithm Club workshop next week, at RWDevCon 2017.
This workshop be like a fun collaborative technical interview, where you’ll pair up with others and tackle questions together.
Each question starts off with a quick < 5 minute introduction on the data structure, and then followed by a 10-20 minute pair programming. After each question, we’ll present our official solution. The theme of the questions is indirect enums. This is a relatively unused Swift language feature that traditional data structures can adopt for some interesting implementations. Our goal is to go through 3 questions.
We hope to see some of you at the workshop at RWDevCon 2017! :]
Where To Go From Here?
The Swift Algorithm Club is always looking for new members. Whether you’re here to learn or here to contribute, we’re happy to have you around.
To learn more about the Swift Algorithm Club, check out our introductory article. We hope to see you at the club! :]