Jacob’s Tech Tavern

Jacob’s Tech Tavern

The Swift Apple doesn't want you to know

Forbidden functions, deranged keywords, and plain weird syntax

Jacob Bartlett's avatar
Jacob Bartlett
May 27, 2025
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I’ve been writing Swift daily for nearly 10 years. I’m impostor syndrome-proof. I’ve seen it all.

But every so often… I don’t know.

Maybe I make a typo in Xcode that unearths forgotten creatures from the Mariana Trench of autocomplete. Perhaps I’m buying pet chimps on the darkweb and accidentally stumble upon a blog post containing arcane syntax.

Today, we’re going to unearth some of the Swift which Apple keeps in the cupboard under the stairs. We’ll ascertain whether these keywords and functions have any real-world use cases, so we can take them out for a bit of sun.

  1. unowned(unsafe)

  2. withoutActuallyEscaping

  3. dlopen()

  4. malloc, free, and withUnsafeTemporaryAllocation

  5. _modify

  6. autoreleasepool

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