#Background

Apple has provided a tonne of documentation on using Swift and Objective C in the same project, however this issue had me very confused for a while.

I wanted my nice, clean, prefixless Swift class to be used in my Objective C code, but I wanted a prefix to keep in line with Obj-C best practices.

The Apple docs state:

Swift also provides a variant of the @objc attribute that allows you to specify name for your symbol in Objective-C.

and provide the following example:

@objc(Squirrel)
class Белка {
    @objc(initWithName:)
    init (имя: String) { /*...*/ }
    @objc(hideNuts:inTree:)
    func прячьОрехи(Int, вДереве: Дерево) { /*...*/ }
}

#The Problem

I specified my nice prefix as suggested in the @objc tag.

@objc(PHDeleteCell)
class DeleteCell {
	/*...*/
}

However my Objective C code couldn’t seem to find the prefixed class, and insisted I use DeleteCell as the class name.

Looking at the generated ModuleName-Swift.h header file, the generated Obj-C header is as follows:

SWIFT_CLASS("PHDeleteCell")
@interface DeleteCell : UITableViewCell
- (instancetype)initWithStyle:(UITableViewCellStyle)style reuseIdentifier:(NSString *)reuseIdentifier OBJC_DESIGNATED_INITIALIZER;
- (instancetype)initWithCoder:(NSCoder *)aDecoder OBJC_DESIGNATED_INITIALIZER;
@end

#The Solution

Well, it’s not so much of a solution, but an answer.

I used the suggested DeleteCell class name in my Objective C code, and built and ran the project. I then set a breakpoint in the debugger and inspected the cell after it was created, which showed the following:

(lldb) po cell
<PHDeleteCell: 0x7fa81a74ad10; baseClass = UITableViewCell; frame = (0 374.13; 375 49); autoresize = W; layer = <CALayer: 0x7fa81a74d9d0>>

Turns out, that at runtime the class prefix is used.

Which means I should use the prefixless class name in my Objective C code, and don’t have to worry about a conflict.