Today, while trying to implement a generic data source in Swift, I ran into my first Swift compiler segmentation fault, yay (looking at Open Radar there seem to be many out there)!

Here’s what I was trying to implement

public class ArrayDataSource<T> : NSObject {

  private var array: Array<T>

  public init(array:Array<T>) {
    self.array = array
  }
}


extension ArrayDataSource : UITableViewDataSource {
  public func tableView(tableView: UITableView, numberOfRowsInSection section: Int) -> Int {
    return 0
  }

  public func tableView(tableView: UITableView, cellForRowAtIndexPath indexPath: NSIndexPath) -> UITableViewCell {
    return UITableViewCell()
  }
}

A class that takes an array and implements UITableViewDataSource using the content of that array (an idea that’s discussed in objc.io issue #1).

The Error

As you can see I didn’t get very far before running into the compiler error. When you compile the above code (in Xcode 6.1.1 or Xcode 6.3) you’ll see the following error message:

Segmentation Fault 11: While emitting IR for source file /Users/benjaminencz/Development/Private/OSS/ListKitDemo/ListKit/ArrayDataSource.swift

Along with a nice stack trace from swift compiler:

Finding a generic reproducable example

Since this issue exists in both Xcode 6.1.1 and Xcode 6.3 I wanted to file a bug report to make sure this gets resolved in future. I played around with different ways to fix the issue, here are two simple ones that worked:

• Move the conformance to the UITableViewDataSource protocol into the class definition instead of the class extension
• Remove the generic type from ArrayDataSource

To actually file a bug report I needed to come up with a generalized, short piece of code that can reproduce the issue. After trying multiple combinations I found this to be the one that describes the problem best:

public class D<T>: NSObject {}

extension D: NSObjectProtocol {}

These two lines are enough code to cause the segmentation fault. The underlying issue seems to be a combination of subclassing from NSObject, using generics and conforming to NSObjectProtocol in a class extension while the actual implementation of NSObjectProtocol happens through inheritance of NSObject.

I couldn’t get this minimalistic example to break with any other combination of protocols and subclassing, it seems to be a problem specific to NSObject. If you find a more general case that causes the segmentation fault, I’d love to hear from you.

For now I have filed a bug report with Apple (19889552) and an Open Radar Issue.