0061-autoreleasepool-signature.md

Add Generic Result and Error Handling to autoreleasepool()

• Proposal: SE-0061
• Author: Timothy J. Wood
• Status: Accepted for Swift 3 (Bug) (Rationale, Bug)
• Review manager: Dave Abrahams

Introduction

The autoreleasepool function in the standard library does not currently support a return value or error handling, making it difficult and error-prone to pass results or errors from the body to the calling context.

Swift-evolution thread: A first call for discussion was made here. Dmitri Gribenko pointed out that adding a generic return type would be useful (first in my premature pull request) and then also here. Jordan Rose pointed out that care was needed to avoid inferring an incorrect return type for the body block, but after testing we confirmed that this is handled correctly by the compiler.

Motivation

The current signature for autoreleasepool forces the creation of temporary variables to capture any results of the inner computation, as well as any error to eventually throw, in the case they are needed in the calling code. This extra boilerplate clutters up the intent, as well as introduces the risk of accidentally unwrapping a nil value.

For example:

func doWork() throws -> Result {
    var result: Result? = nil
    var error: ErrorProtocol? = nil
    autoreleasepool {
        do {
            ... actual computation which hopefully assigns to result but might not ...
        } catch let e {
            error = e
        }
    }
    guard let result = result else {
        throw error!
    }
    return result!
}

Proposed solution

I'd like to propose altering the signature of the standard library autoreleasepool function to allow for a generic return type, as well as allowing a throw of an error:

public func autoreleasepool<Result>(@noescape body: () throws -> Result) rethrows -> Result

The case above becomes much more clear and less error-prone since the compiler can enforce that exactly one of the error and result are used:

func doWork() throws -> Result {
    return try autoreleasepool {
        ... actual computation which either returns or throws ...
    }
}

As an aside, since this proposes changing the signature already, I would like to further propose changing the argument label from code to body. This seems more in line with the parameter name used in the rest of the standard library, but isn't central to this proposal.

Detailed design

The updated standard library function would read:

public func autoreleasepool<Result>(@noescape body: () throws -> Result) rethrows -> Result {
    let pool = __pushAutoreleasePool()
    defer {
        __popAutoreleasePool(pool)
    }
    return try body()
}

Impact on existing code

No impact expected.

Alternatives considered

The original request, SR-842 only suggested adding throws, but Dmitri Gribenko pointed out that adding a generic return type would be better.

Further discussion raised the question of whether autoreleasepool should behave like a statement in the future, or whether it should behave like an expression by returning the result of the passed in body, with some weighing in on either side. Chris Lattner drew an analogy to forEach and pointed out that @autoreleasepool is a statement in Objective-C, while Jordan Rose found this case more like withCString, or withUnsafeMutablePointer, where having them return a value yields nice simplifications and avoids optional vars.

I also explored whether third-party code could wrap autoreleasepool themselves with something like:

func autoreleasepool_generic<ResultType>(@noescape code: Void throws -> ResultType) rethrows -> ResultType {
    var result:ResultType?
    var error:ErrorProtocol?

    autoreleasepool {
        do {
            result = try code()
        } catch let e {
            error = e
        }
    }

    if let result = result {
        return result
    }

    throw error! // Doesn't compile.
}

but this doesn't compile, since in a function with rethrows, only the call to the passed in function that is marked as throws is allowed to throw. Even if it was possible to create a rethrows wrapper from the non-throwing function, it is better to add the safety to the standard library in the first place.