Implementing copy() in Swift

Question

I want to be able to copy a custom class in Swift. So far, so good. In Objective-C I just had to implement the NSCopying protocol, which means implementing

Answer 1

You can just write your own copy method

class MyRootClass {
    var someVariable:Int
    init() {
        someVariable = 2
    }
    init(otherObject:MyRootClass) {
        someVariable = otherObject.someVariable
    }
    func copy() -> MyRootClass {
       return MyRootClass(self)
    }
}

The benefit of this is when you are using subclasses around your project, you can call the 'copy' command and it will copy the subclass. If you just init a new one to copy, you will also have to rewrite that class for each object...

var object:Object
....
//This code will only work for specific class
var objectCopy = Object()

//vs

//This code will work regardless of whether you are using subClass or      superClass
var objectCopy = object.copy()