A Simple Way to Conform to Identifiable Without adding an ID to a Legacy Data Model Object

As the title suggests, I have a mature data model, and I want to add conformance to Identifiable but (for backwards compatibility reasons) not actually add id as an instance variable

My model object in question already implements Hashable, so plan A was to use the hashValue generate id. Sadly hashValue is an Int and id needs to be a UUID. So how does one convert an Int to a UUID?

As is often the case there was a discussion on StackOverflow offering alternatives. The option that leapt out at me introduced to Swift language options I had never used before.

1. withUnsafeBytes
2. load(fromByteOffset: as:)

withUnsafeBytes is an array ‘operator’ that will (I believe) iterate over all the bytes in the array. load will pour the bytes into a new object whose type is specified by the as: parameter. As somebody who has done a small amount of writing c and ZERO c++ this code feels very foreign to me.

I chose to solve my problems with two pieces of code. First I extended Int like this:

extension Int {
    public var asID: UUID {
        let vals: [Int64] = [Int64(self), 0]
        return vals.withUnsafeBytes { $0.load(as: UUID.self) }
    }
}

I then added Identifiable conformance like this:

extension Thread: Identifiable {
    public var id: UUID {
        return self.hashValue.asID
    }
}

Solving this problem reminded me just how much complexity there is ‘under the hood’ in almost any code we write. I find it amazing that:

1. There are smart people who are well versed in the (obscure?) corners of the software engineering information domain.
2. By invoking an appropriate combination of keywords in the search bar, I can be connected to the helpful guidance created by these smart people.

Yay technology!