How to create NS_OPTIONS-style bitmask enumerations in Swift?

Question

In Apple's documentation about interacting with C APIs, they describe the way NS_ENUM-marked C-style enumerations are imported as Swift enumerations. This makes sense, and since enumerations in Swift are readily provided as the enum value type it's easy to see how to create our own.

Further down, it says this about NS_OPTIONS-marked C-style options:

Swift also imports options marked with the NS_OPTIONS macro. Whereas options behave similarly to imported enumerations, options can also support some bitwise operations, such as &, |, and ~. In Objective-C, you represent an empty option set with the constant zero (0). In Swift, use nil to represent the absence of any options.

Given that there isn't an options value type in Swift, how can we create a C-Style options variable to work with?

Answer 1

Swift 3.0

Almost identical to Swift 2.0. OptionSetType was renamed to OptionSet and enums are written lower case by convention.

struct MyOptions : OptionSet {
    let rawValue: Int

    static let firstOption  = MyOptions(rawValue: 1 << 0)
    static let secondOption = MyOptions(rawValue: 1 << 1)
    static let thirdOption  = MyOptions(rawValue: 1 << 2)
}

Instead of providing a none option, the Swift 3 recommendation is to simply use an empty array literal:

let noOptions: MyOptions = []

Other usage:

let singleOption = MyOptions.firstOption
let multipleOptions: MyOptions = [.firstOption, .secondOption]
if multipleOptions.contains(.secondOption) {
    print("multipleOptions has SecondOption")
}
let allOptions = MyOptions(rawValue: 7)
if allOptions.contains(.thirdOption) {
    print("allOptions has ThirdOption")
}

Swift 2.0

In Swift 2.0, protocol extensions take care of most of the boilerplate for these, which are now imported as a struct that conforms to OptionSetType. (RawOptionSetType has disappeared as of Swift 2 beta 2.) The declaration is far simpler:

struct MyOptions : OptionSetType {
    let rawValue: Int

    static let None         = MyOptions(rawValue: 0)
    static let FirstOption  = MyOptions(rawValue: 1 << 0)
    static let SecondOption = MyOptions(rawValue: 1 << 1)
    static let ThirdOption  = MyOptions(rawValue: 1 << 2)
}

Now we can use set-based semantics with MyOptions:

let singleOption = MyOptions.FirstOption
let multipleOptions: MyOptions = [.FirstOption, .SecondOption]
if multipleOptions.contains(.SecondOption) {
    print("multipleOptions has SecondOption")
}
let allOptions = MyOptions(rawValue: 7)
if allOptions.contains(.ThirdOption) {
    print("allOptions has ThirdOption")
}

Swift 1.2

Looking at the Objective-C options that were imported by Swift (UIViewAutoresizing, for example), we can see that options are declared as a struct that conforms to protocol RawOptionSetType, which in turn conforms to _RawOptionSetType, Equatable, RawRepresentable, BitwiseOperationsType, and NilLiteralConvertible. We can create our own like this:

struct MyOptions : RawOptionSetType {
    typealias RawValue = UInt
    private var value: UInt = 0
    init(_ value: UInt) { self.value = value }
    init(rawValue value: UInt) { self.value = value }
    init(nilLiteral: ()) { self.value = 0 }
    static var allZeros: MyOptions { return self(0) }
    static func fromMask(raw: UInt) -> MyOptions { return self(raw) }
    var rawValue: UInt { return self.value }

    static var None: MyOptions { return self(0) }
    static var FirstOption: MyOptions   { return self(1 << 0) }
    static var SecondOption: MyOptions  { return self(1 << 1) }
    static var ThirdOption: MyOptions   { return self(1 << 2) }
}

Now we can treat this new option set, MyOptions, just like described in Apple's documentation: you can use enum-like syntax:

let opt1 = MyOptions.FirstOption
let opt2: MyOptions = .SecondOption
let opt3 = MyOptions(4)

And it also behaves like we'd expect options to behave:

let singleOption = MyOptions.FirstOption
let multipleOptions: MyOptions = singleOption | .SecondOption
if multipleOptions & .SecondOption != nil {     // see note
    println("multipleOptions has SecondOption")
}
let allOptions = MyOptions.fromMask(7)   // aka .fromMask(0b111)
if allOptions & .ThirdOption != nil {
    println("allOptions has ThirdOption")
}

I've built a generator to create a Swift option set without all the find/replacing.

Latest: Modifications for Swift 1.1 beta 3.