Codextended

Welcome to Codextended — a suite of extensions that aims to make Swift’s Codable API easier to use by giving it type inference-powered capabilities and conveniences. It’s not a wrapper, nor is it a brand new framework, instead it augments Codable directly in a very lightweight way.

Codable is awesome!

No third-party serialization framework can beat the convenience of Codable. Since it’s built in, it can both leverage the compiler to automatically synthesize all serialization code needed in many situations, and it can also be used as a common bridge between multiple different modules — without having to introduce any shared dependencies.

However, once some form of customization is needed — for example to transform parts of the decoded data, or to provide default values for certain keys — the standard Codable API starts to become really verbose. It also doesn’t take advantage of Swift’s robust type inference capabilities, which produces a lot of unnecessary boilerplate.