Vexil 3 Alpha 1

This is an initial alpha release of Vexil 3.

Vexil 3 is a ground-up rewrite using Swift Macros and the Visitor Pattern to reduce usage of Mirror and memory usage as well as improving the overall performance.

Important

Vexillographer is not available in Alpha 1.

This is a preview release intended to allow early adopters to assess the impact to their codebase while we work on the remaining pieces in parallel. It has not been tested with production workloads yet (but all unit tests pass).

To learn more about Vexil 3 and what is changing see the Migrating Guide.

🚀 What's Changed

• A macro replacement for the @Flag property wrapper.
• A macro replacement for the @FlagGroup property wrapper.
• A @FlagContainer macro to replace the FlagContainer protocol and generate conformance to the Visitor Pattern.
• Use of AsyncSequence and AsyncStream under the hood to stream sets of changed flag keys.
• Lazy lookup of publisher flag values.
• Strict concurrency support.
• Dropped support for Flag Diagnostics. You can implement FlagVisitor and walk the hierarchy to collect this information yourself if required.
• Dropped support for Swift <5.10, iOS <15, tvOS <15, macOS <12, watchOS <8.

📝 What's still to come before we go to beta

• Vexillographer is not yet available.
• Swift 6 + Xcode 16 support.
• swift-testing migration.

Release 2.2.2: Bug fixes 🐛

🐛 Bug Fixes

• Fix navigation issue for nested flags in Vexillographer @patANZx (#112)

🧰 Maintenance

• Removed deprecated macOS 10.15 and added latest Xcode versions under macOS 12 @bok- (#111)
• Changed from SwiftLint to SwiftFormat @bok- (#110)

🆕 New Contributors

A huge thanks to new contributors to this project!

@patANZx made their first contribution in #112

Full Changelog: v2.2.1...v2.2.2

Release 2.2.1: Slimming down 🤏

What’s Changed

🚀 Features

• Reduce code bloat from FlagContainers @KeithBauerANZ (#106)

🧰 Maintenance

• Update Vexillographer URL @huwr (#105)

🆕 New Contributors

A huge thanks to new contributors to this project!

• @huwr made their first contribution in #105
• @KeithBauerANZ made their first contribution in #106

Full Changelog: v2.2.0...v2.2.1

Release 2.2.0: Flag Diagnostics 🔬

What’s Changed

This release is all about diagnostics! With great flexibility sometimes comes complexity, and even with a simple stack of a remote flag value provider and local user overrides it can sometimes be a chore to find out which flags are active and why.

This release adds:

• Point-in-time diagnostics using flagPole.makeDiagnostics() and try snapshot.makeDiagnostics()
• Real-time diagnostics using flagPole.makeDiagnosticsPublisher()
• A read-only view in Vexillographer by passing in nil as the source to edit.

Diagnostics should have almost no overhead unless you're actively using them, and even then it should be minimal. You can read more about Diagnostics in the documentation.

🚀 Features

• Added a read-only view to Vexillographer @bok- (#102)
• Added diagnostics for flag resolution and real-time updates @bok- (#101)

🐛 Bug Fixes

• Fixed ability to subclass the FlagValueDictionary @bok- (#100)

Release v2.1.0: Codable FlagValueDictionaries

What’s Changed

• Add Codable conformance to FlagValueDictionary @bok- (#99)

🚩 Vexil v2

What’s Changed

💥 Breaking Changes

This release includes one breaking change:

• FlagValueDictionary now uses [String: BoxedFlagValue] as its internal storage instead of [String: Any]. This allows better interaction with the flag values, not just the keys, but will be a breaking change for anyone casting directly from Any. (#93)

🚀 Features

• Changed FlagValueDictionary to use [String: BoxedFlagValue] as its internal storage @bok- (#93)
• Added Codable support to BoxedFlagValue @bok- (#91)
• Added support for the standard Swift default setter syntax @bok- (#85)

🧰 Maintenance

• Fixed invalid destination in DocC generation workflow @bok- (#94)
• Updated workflows to reflect the release of Swift 5.5 and Xcode 13.0 @bok- (#92)

Release 1.4: FlagValueSource Manipulation 🦥

What’s Changed

This release adds an optional parameter to FlagPole.snapshot(of:) to allow you to take a snapshot of just the flags that have been set on a specific FlagSource.

It also adds a two new methods:

• FlagPole.copyFlagValues(from:to:) to copy all flags from one FlagValueSource to another.
• FlagPole.removeFlagValues(in:) to remove all of the flag values in a specific FlagValueSource.

It also adds a new supported means of publishing real-time flag value changes, in FlagValueSource.valuesDidChange(keys:). If your FlagValueSource knows which flags have changed at any one time you can now emit a Set of their keys and Vexil will re-use an existing Snapshot and only update those keys that have changed. This can cut down on the amount of computation required with large flag hierarchies. FlagValueSource.valueDidChange is maintained for backwards compatibility.

Our documentation website (https://vexil.unsignedapps.com/) is now powered by DocC 🎉

🚀 Features

• Support FlagValueSources publishing changes to individual flags @bok- (#81)
• Added support for removing/resetting all flag values in a given FlagValueSource @bok- (#80)
• Added ability to create snapshots from specific sources, and to copy flag values between sources @bok- (#79)

📚 Documentation Changes

• Migrated docs and the website (vexil.unsignedapps.com) to DocC @bok- (#82)

🧰 Maintenance

• DocC Migration @bok- (#82)

v1.3.6: More Bug Fixes 🐛

What’s Changed

🐛 Bug Fixes

• Fixed disappearing Snapshots @bok- (#78)

When working with a Snapshot it will dynamically create MutableFlagGroups to wrap any FlagGroup so that you can manipulate flags throughout the hierarchy and their values would be saved back to the Snapshot. However, we were using a weak reference to the snapshot, so in cases where you weren't retaining the snapshot itself the MutableFlagGroup would revert back to its defaults as the snapshot would be nil.

This is especially the case if you were using FlagPole.publisher and mapping to one of the flag groups. For example, if you were using flagPole.publisher.map({ $0.mySubgroup }).removeDuplicates(), the behaviour would not be what you would expect as the RemoveDuplicates publisher would retain the MutableFlagGroup, but the Snapshot backing it would be lost.

Misc

• CustomDebugStringConvertible Conformance @bok- (#77)
• Added additional publishing-based Equatable tests @bok- (#76)

v1.3.5: Bug Fixes 🐞

What’s Changed

🐛 Bug Fixes

• Filter UserDefaults so only the subscribed instance emits @bok- (#75)

We now filter the publisher of UserDefaults.didChangeNotification to ensure that only the instance of UserDefaults you are subscribed to will trigger changes to your flags. So if you're using an app group instance of UserDefaults you will no longer see triggers when UIKit or other frameworks update UserDefaults.standard.

This would also cause flag values to flop as different instance of UserDefaults would have different flag values set.

v1.3.4: Equatable Support

What’s Changed

🚀 Features

• Added support for Equatable and Hashable Flags, Flag Groups and Snapshots when their contents are also Equatable or Hashable @bok- (#73)