Yet Another Either Type! 🥳

Did the world need another Swift Either type? No. Are We suffering from Not-Invented-Here Syndrome? Maybe. Did We still think this was a good idea? Definitely.

Either is a concept in many functional and strongly-typed languages which allows a value of either one type or another, to be stored in one field:

/// A response for the population query 
struct PopulationResponse {

    /// The list of people in the population
    ///
    /// - Note: In 1.x, this was a list of names as `String`s.
    ///         In 2.x and newer, this is a map of UUIDs to `Person` objects
    let people: Either<[String], [UUID: Person]>
}

This implementation brings a few advantages:

Automatic Conformance

This automatically conforms an instance of Either to various protocols if its Left and Right types also conform to them.

Currently, these are supported:

• Equatable – Brings == and !=. When Left and Right are unequal types, this considers left to never equal right. When those types are equal, this ignores the leftness and rightness positions

• Comparable – Brings <, <=, >=, and >. When the positions are unequal types, this considers left to never be less than nor greater than right. When those types are equal, this ignores the positions

• Hashable – Allows an instance of Either to transparently be given the same hash as whatever value it contains

• CustomStringConvertible – Provides a .description field with the same value as the Either's contained value's .description field

• CustomDebugStringConvertible – Provides a .debugDescription field with the same value as the Either's contained value's .debugDescription field

• Codable – Allows Either instances to be encoded. This results in a multi-value keyed container which only ever contains one key-value pair where the key is "left" or "right", and the value is whatever the instance's value encodes to:

  {
      "either": {
          "left": {
              "name": "Dax",
              "favoriteColor": 6765239
          }
      }
  }

  or:

  {
      "either": {
          "right": 42
      }
  }

• Sendable Simply declares Sendable conformance when Left and Right are also Sendable

Unwrapping

Obviously you gotta eventually get a value out of this, and it offers a few approaches:

• left – If the Either is a .left, then that value is returned, else nil
• right – If the Either is a .right, then that value is returned, else nil

When both Left and Right are the same type, then these are also available:

• value – The current value, disregarding whether that value is .left or .right
• * – Inspired by the semantics of dereferencing a pointer in C (and because Swift doesn't allow custom postfix !), place this before the Either instance for the same behavior as calling `.value:

  func name(_ user: Either<Person, Person>) -> String {
      return (*user).name
  }

• Value – Since both positions are the same type, this typealias allows you to reference that type without specifically using Left or Right:

  typealias LegacyOrMigratedUser = Either<User, User>
  
  func account(of user: LegacyOrMigratedUser) -> LegacyOrMigratedUser.Value.Account {
      (*user).account
  }

Mapping

This provides various approaches for mapping an Either. Generally these consider it a collection of exactly one element, similarly to how Optional is treated as a collection of exactly 0 or 1 elements.

• map(left:right:) — Map both positions of this either to different values/types, regardless of its current value. Only one of these callbacks is called each time this function is called (the one mapping a value), but this allows you to reuse the same call many times to map both sides depending on which one is set.

• map(left:) – Map only the Left position of this either to a different value/type. The callback is only called when this either is a .left

• map(right:) – Map only the Right position. Inverse of map(left:)

Conversions

This allows you to convert instances of some types into Either and back:

• Optional – Any Either whose Left is Void can be turned into an Optional<Right>, and vice versa any Optional can be turned into an Either<Void, Wrapped>. Just pass one to the initializer of the other:

  let either = Either<Void, String>.right("I'm valued")
  let optional = Optional(either)
  print(optional!) // Prints `I'm valued`

  var optional: String? = nil
  var either = Either<Void, _>(optional)
  print(either) // Prints `left()`
  
  optional = "I'm not sorry"
  either = .init(optional)
  print(either) // Prints `right("I\'m not sorry")`

• Result – When Either's Rigth is an Error, you can convert it to and from a Result similarly to the above Optional conversions:

  let either = Either<Data, Error>.left(Data(base64Encoded: "SG93ZHk=")!)
  let result = Result(either)
  print(result) // Prints `success(5 bytes)`

  var result = Result<Data, Error>(catching: { try Data(contentsOf: URL(string: "https://example.com")!) })
  var either = Either<_, Error>(result)
  print(either) // Prints `left(1256 bytes)`
  
  result = .init(catching: { try Data(contentsOf: URL(string: "https://fakeDomain.fakeTld")!) })
  either = .init(result)
  print(either) // Prints `right(Error Domain=NSCocoaErrorDomain Code=256 "The file couldn’t be opened." UserInfo={NSURL=https://fakeDomain.fakeTld})`