An Abstract Class

In essense, what we're going to build, is a generic wrapper (or box) that hosts a type conforming to a protocol with an associated type. It does so by implementing the requirements of the protocol and forwarding all invocations to the boxed type.

The first new type we need for that is a base class that acts as a abstract class:

class AnyComputerBase<Processor: CPU>: Computer {

     var processor: Processor {

         fatalError()

     }

     var processorCount: Int {

         fatalError()

     }

}

This class should never be initialized, as it only provides an abstract template of what subclasses should implement. While other languages (like Java) allow explicitly marking classes as abstract, Swift doesn't offer us a way to do so. One solution to this is adding a fileprivate init to this class. However as that requires subclasses to be in the same file as this superclass, we can also just make the whole class private with an even better result. Now, other parts of the code won't even know about the existence of AnyComputerBase or even initialize it:

private class AnyComputerBase<Processor: CPU>: Computer {

...

}

Why do we even need this, and what does it do? As you can see, it just implements the Computer protocol by implementing the requirements and doing nothing in there. The more important part is that it moves the associated type from the protocol into a generic type for the class: AnyComputerBase<Processor: CPU>.

Swift automatically figures out that Processor is the typealias for Computer.ProcessorType. However, when in doubt you can also add an extra typealias:

class AnyComputerBase<Processor: CPU>: Computer {

   typealias ProcessorType = Processor

   ...

}