Skip to content

Swift Bindings

UniFFI ships with production-quality support for generating Swift bindings. Concepts from the UDL file map into Swift as follows:

  • Primitive datatypes map to their obvious Swift counterpart, e.g. u32 becomes UInt32, string becomes String, bytes becomes Data, etc.
  • An object interface declared as interface T is represented as a Swift protocol TProtocol and a concrete Swift class T that conforms to it. Having the protocol declared explicitly can be useful for mocking instances of the class in unittests.
  • A dictionary struct declared as dictionary T is represented as a Swift struct T with public mutable fields.
  • An enum declared enum T or [Enum] interface T is represented as a Swift enum T with appropriate variants.
  • Optional types are represented using Swift's builtin optional type syntax T?.
  • Sequences are represented as Swift arrays, and Maps as Swift dictionaries.
  • Errors are represented as Swift enums that conform to the Error protocol.
  • Function calls that have an associated error type are marked with throws, and hence must be called using one of Swift's try syntax variants.
  • Failing assertions, Rust panics, and other unexpected errors in the generated code are translated into a private enum conforming to the Error protocol.
    • If this happens inside a throwing Swift function, it can be caught and handled by a catch-all catch statement (but do so at your own risk, because it indicates that something has gone seriously wrong).
    • If this happens inside a non-throwing Swift function, it will be converted into a fatal Swift error that cannot be caught.

Conceptually, the generated bindings are split into two Swift modules, one for the low-level C FFI layer and one for the higher-level Swift bindings. For a UniFFI component named "example" we generate:

  • A C header file exampleFFI.h declaring the low-level structs and functions for calling into Rust, along with a corresponding exampleFFI.modulemap to expose them to Swift.
  • A Swift source file example.swift that imports the exampleFFI module and wraps it to provide the higher-level Swift API.

Splitting up the bindings in this way gives you flexibility over how both the Rust code and the Swift code are distributed to consumers. For example, you may choose to compile and distribute the Rust code for several UniFFI components as a single shared library in order to reduce the compiled code size, while distributing their Swift wrappers as individual modules.

For more technical details on how the bindings work internally, please see the module documentation