RxSwift: Requiescat in Pace (RIP)

Did Apple just kill RxSwift with its own reactive framework?

By now you’re probably at least aware of one of WWDC’s biggest announcements: SwiftUI. If not, you may want to take a moment to read my take on it, Are You an iOS Ex-Expert?

Regardless, what you may not be aware of is that Apple has effectively killed RxSwift at the same time… by baking its successor directly into iOS 13, iPadOS 13, macOS Catalina, watchOS 6, and tvOS 13.

Meet Combine

Combine is Apple’s very own reactive framework. To quote:

The Combine framework provides a declarative Swift API for processing values over time. These values can represent user interface events, network responses, scheduled events, and many other kinds of asynchronous data.

Combine declares publishers to expose values that can change over time, and subscribers to receive those values from the publishers.

Combine also provides operators to manipulate those values, and if you examine the list you’ll see many, many familiar faces.

Filter, map, flatMap, compactMap, combine, merge, concat, zip, reduce, scan, throttle, debounce, timeout, and others.