Preface: POP and OOP are not mutually exclusive. They’re design paradigms that are greatly related.
The primary aspect of POP over OOP is that is prefers composition over inheritance. There are several benefits to this.
In large inheritance hierarchies, the ancestor classes tend to contain most of the (generalized) functionality, with the leaf subclasses making only minimal contributions. The issue here is that the ancestor classes end up doing a lot of things. For example, a Car
drives, stores cargo, seats passengers, plays music, etc. These are many functionalities that are each quite distinct, but they all get indivisibly lumped into the Car
class. Descendants of Car
, such as Ferrari
, Toyota
, BMW
, etc. all make minimal modifications to this base class.
The consequence of this is that there is reduced code reuse. My BoomBox
also plays music, but it’s not a car. Inheriting the music-playing functionality from Car
isn’t possible.
What Swift encourages instead is that these large monolithic classes be broken down into a composition of smaller components. These components can then be more easily reused. Both Car
and BoomBox
can use MusicPlayer
.
Swift offers multiple features to achieve this, but the most important by far are protocol extensions. They allow implementation of a protocol to exist separate of its implementing class, so that many classes may simply implement this protocol and instantly gain its functionality.