Variadic DisposeBag for Combine subscriptions

With the announce of SwiftUI and Combine frameworks on WWDC2019 Apple has clearly outlined their vision on the future of the software development for their platforms, and that future is going to be Reactive.

Just like it happened in the past with ARC for Objective-C, Autolayout, or Swift, there is only a couple years lag between the announce of the new Apple’s technology, and it’s pervasive use. So if one was still reluctant about learning functional reactive programming, now they are left with a choice to board the Rocket now or stay in the fading world of object-oriented UIKit.

However, Apple has made a great job of making the transition as seamless as possible for developers: Combine is a masterpiece of simplicity, among other reactive frameworks.

It provides really concise and programmer-friendly API that’s just enough for basic handling of the “values over time”.

Houston, we have a problem…

As you’d expect from the conciseness of the API, there always will be someone who’s missing his favorite fancy operator from a reactive framework they’re used to.

I understand that. But it feels like Combine is missing something fundamental, and the suggested alternative seems cumbersome and old-fashioned: I’m talking about the memory management of the subscriptions.

RxSwift provides us with DisposeBag; it’s competitor, ReactiveSwift, has a counterpart: Lifetime.

But what about Combine? The subscription returns a token of type AnyCancellable that prior Xcode 11.1 we couldn’t put anywhere except for storing in an instance variable:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 class ValueConsumer { private var subscription1 : AnyCancellable ? private var subscription2 : AnyCancellable ? private var subscription3 : AnyCancellable ? private let mySubject = CurrentValueSubject < Int , Never > ( 0 ) private var myVar : Int = 0 func consumeValues ( publisher1 , ... ) { subscription1 = publisher1 . sink { print ( "New value: \( $0 ) " ) } subscription2 = mySubject . subscribe ( publisher2 ) subscription3 = publisher3 . assign ( to : \ . myVar , on : self ) } }

Xcode 11.1 added method store(in: Set<AnyCancellable>) in an extension for AnyCancellable , so the code now can be refactored this way:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 class ValueConsumer { private var cancelBag = Set < AnyCancellable > () private let mySubject = CurrentValueSubject < Int , Never > ( 0 ) private var myVar : Int = 0 func consumeValues ( publisher1 , ... ) { publisher1 . sink { print ( "New value: \( $0 ) " ) } . store ( in : & cancelBag ) subscription2 = mySubject . subscribe ( publisher2 ) . store ( in : & cancelBag ) subscription3 = publisher3 . assign ( to : \ . myVar , on : self ) . store ( in : & cancelBag ) } }

Even though this looks cleaner, the number of lines stayed about the same.

But how about taking one step further and implement Variadic DisposeBag?

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 class ValueConsumer { private var cancelBag = Set < AnyCancellable > () private let mySubject = CurrentValueSubject < Int , Never > ( 0 ) private var myVar : Int = 0 func consumeValues ( publisher1 , ... ) { cancelBag . collect { publisher1 . sink { print ( "New value: \( $0 ) " ) } mySubject . subscribe ( publisher2 ) publisher3 . assign ( to : \ . myVar , on : self ) } } }

The collect function above is using the new @functionBuilder attribute available in Swift 5.1, the same one that allows view containers from SwiftUI, such as VStack , to take an array of elements without any , separators.

So now we can collect all the subscriptions tokens without explicitly calling .store(in: &cancelBag)

The full gist for the CancelBag implementation (~20 lines of code) can be found on Github.

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