[Overengineered] Package.swift file with targets as variables and MARK you can jump to using jump bar.

[Sajjon]

TCA is great! One drawback however is the Package.swift file which uses string literals for target dependencies becomes hard to navigate.

Even worse, since vanilla Package declaration uses the Package.init and using TCA we declare lots of targets, this in combination with the fact that we cannot // MARK inside this massive init, making it impossible to use the "jump bar" or even get a meaningful mimimap.

Also we have to remember to add the Target to Product Library declaration! At least that is what Isowords does

Possibly the worst drawback of them all is that if I make a typo in the string literals either when declaring my own targets as a dependency for any other target or a typo for an external dependecy everything breaks, and diagnostics are sometimes not great at producing easy to understand errors.

I have a solution to all of these drawbacks! I recently migrated my 1000 LOC Package.swift file in Zhip (branch: swiftui-tca) which uses these simple ideas:

• Declare a simple struct for external dependencies e.g. ExternalDependency, declare all external dependencies using a function which creates an instance of ExternalDependency and adds it to a global variable var externalDependencies: [ExternalDependency], we will use this array in the end when creating out Product and after appending it to externalDependencies array, return it. Capture this new instance in a variable, e.g. let ComposableArchitecture = externalDependency(...)
• Declare global variable var target: [Target] = [], to which we will append declarations of our internal targets.
• Declare internal targets as variable - NOT IN GLOBAL SCOPE (else you won't get help with ordering (inter-dependecy) but weird crashes) - inside a wrapping func which inits your Product and returns it, by calling a declare function which appends it to targets array and returns the name of the new target. E.g.

func makeProduct() -> Product { 

// must be declared above APIClientLive, else error, ofc. So we cannot get alphabetical ordering of declared targets 
let APIClient = declareTarget(...)

// MARK: - APIClientLive +Test
let APIClientLive = declareTarget(
  name: "APIClientLive", 
  alsoDeclareTestTarget: true, 
  externalDependencies: [
    ComposableArchitecture, 
    Alamofire,
  ], 
  internalDependencies: [
    APIClient, 
    Common,
  ]
)

Note that the type of APIClientLive is just a String. Also note that we did not pass in any string literal except the name! Meaning internalDependencies parameter in declareTarget accepts a String array, but this can easily be upgraded to some tuple of simple struct to accomodate conditional inclusion, e.g. depending on platform. We are using variables and we get autocorrect help and compilation error if we made a typo. Even better! WE CAN GO TO DECLARATION of each dependency by CMD clicking! And we get MARK which we can jump to using jump bar.

Disadvantage

• Custom
• Must declare targets in order in which they are referred, so cannot use alphabetical order