Client-Side Slice-to-Swift Mapping

The client-side Slice-to-Swift mapping defines how Slice data types are translated to Swift types, and how clients invoke operations, pass parameters, and handle errors. Much of the Swift mapping is intuitive. For example, Slice sequences map to Swift arrays so there is essentially nothing new you have to learn in order to use Slice sequences in Swift.

The Swift API to the Ice run time is fully thread-safe. Obviously, you must still synchronize access to data from different threads. For example, if you have two threads sharing a sequence, you cannot safely have one thread insert into the sequence while another thread is iterating over the sequence. However, you only need to concern yourself with concurrent access to your own data — the Ice run time itself is fully thread safe, and none of the Ice APIs require you to serialize your calls.

Much of what appears in this chapter is reference material. We suggest that you skim the material on the initial reading and refer back to specific sections as needed. However, we recommend that you read at least the mappings for exceptions, interfaces, and operations in detail because these sections cover how to call operations from a client, pass parameters, and handle exceptions.

The Ice Module

All of the APIs for the Ice run time are defined in the Ice module, to avoid clashes with definitions for other libraries or applications. Some of the contents of the Ice module are generated from Slice definitions; other parts of the Ice module provide special-purpose definitions that do not have a corresponding Slice definition. We will incrementally cover the contents of the Ice module throughout this manual.

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