Swift return statements and line breaks

Sep 10, 2014 swift

I’m currently porting some iOS games from Objective-C to Swift. While doing this, I stumbled upon something interesting in how Swift handles return statements and new lines.

When I tried to temporarily disable the logic of a function, by adding a return statement topmost in the function body, I noticed that it didn’t work the way I expected it to.

func doStuff() {
   return
   print("Doing some stuff")   
   //Some code for animating the hand
}

Turns out that unlike Objective-C, Swift doesn’t abort after the return statement, but rather returns the result of the second line of code.

I thought that the return statement would immediately end all execution, but it turns out that this isn’t the case with Swift. Something to be aware of.