How Copy-on-Write(CoW) in Swift works and optimizes memory
Swift is designed around two core principles: safety and performance. At first glance, these goals often appear to conflict. Value types provide safety and predictability, but copying large values repeatedly can be expensive. Reference types provide efficiency through shared storage, but they introduce shared mutable state. Swift solves this tension elegantly through a memory optimization technique called Copy-on-Write (CoW). If you’ve used Array, Dictionary, Set, or String, you’ve already relied on Copy-on-Write — even if you didn’t realize it. ...