Swift's type system is (mostly) fantastic. Its tight constraints and flexible generics allow developers to express complicated concepts in an extremely safe manner because the Swift compiler will detect and flag any inconsistencies within the types in your program.
While this is great most of the time, there are times where Swift's strict typing gets in the way of what we're trying to build. This is especially true if you're working on code that involves protocols and generics.
With protocols and generics, you can express ideas that are insanely complex and flexible. But sometimes you're coding along happily and the Swift compiler starts yelling at you. You've hit one of those scenarios where your code is so flexible and dynamic that Swift isn't having it.
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When the Swift compiler keeps yelling at you and you have no idea how to make it stop, it might be time to apply some type erasure.
In this week's blog post I will explain what type erasure is and show an example of how type erasure can be used to craft highly flexible code that the Swift compiler will be happy to compile.
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