Judging by the number of talks, articles and discussions related to reactive programming in Swift, it looks like the community has been taken by the storm. It’s not that the concept of reactiveness itself is a new shiny thing. The idea of using it for the development within the Apple ecosystem had been played with for a long time. Frameworks like ReactiveCocoa have existed for years and did an awesome job at bringing the reactive programming to the Objective-C. However, the new and exciting features of Swift make it even more convenient to go full in on the “signals as your apps’ building blocks” model.
Here at Polidea, we’ve also embraced the reactive paradigm, mostly in the form of RxSwift, the port of C#-originated Reactive Extensions. And we couldn’t be happier! It helps us build more expressive and better-architectured apps faster and easier. Unifying various patterns (target-action, completion block, notification) under a universal API that is easy to use, easy to compose and easy to test has so many benefits. Also, introducing new team members is way easier now, when so much logic is written with methods familiar either from sequences (map, filter, zip, flatMap) or from other languages that Reactive Extensions had been ported to.