In Objective-C, if you want to make use of one of Apple's internal classes, all you have to do is declare the class's interface with the methods you want to use. From there you can create instances of the class by using the NSClassFromString
function to obtain a reference to the class object, like so:
[[NSClassFromString(@"_NSSomeClass") alloc] initWithFoo:5]
In Swift, this is not so easy. Referencing the type of the "hollow" Objective-C class interface anywhere in Swift code makes the compiler query the class for type information that is not known at compile time. This presents a huge problem. You cannot dynamically initialize a type either. Though, it seems the following code used to work at one point: