char ** in Swift

A "string" in C is just a continuous chunk of char values in memory with \0 at the end. To reference it, a variable of type char * is used to store the address of the first char (commonly known as a pointer 😉). It's common to have string manipulating functions take this form:

void foo(char **errorMessage) {
    // ...
}

To mutate the arugment errorMessage of type char *, foo takes a pointer to it, (char *)*.

How do we call foo in Swift?

Here's the tl;dr. We can wrap it in a Swift function that have the same interface:

func fooSwift(inout errorMessage: String?) {
    var message: UnsafeMutablePointer<CChar> = nil

    foo(&message)
    errorMessage = String.fromCString(message)
}

errorMessage will contain whatever our C function foo assigns to it.

So, what's really going on here?

Inspecting foo's signature in Swift, we see

func foo(errorMessage: UnsafeMutablePointer<UnsafeMutablePointer<CChar>>)

… okey, errorMessage's type is little intimidating to someone who doesn't use C functions in Swift everyday (like me)!

Let's break it down. Swift does a ton of work for us to interoperate with C:

CChar is Swift's name for char in C (shocking, amiright?)
UnsafeMutablePointer<Type> roughly translates to Type *, so syntactically, we can see why UnsafeMutablePointer<UnsafeMutablePointer<CChar>> is used to bridge the C type (char *)*.
A function that takes UnsafeMutablePointer<Type> argument accepts inout Type values. Therefore, we can look at foo as
```
foo(inout errorMessage: UnsafeMutablePointer<CChar>)
```
Swift acknowledge C's string representation and provides convenient methods for converting char * / UnsafeMutablePointer<CChar> to its own String type (String.fromCString()).

Hopefully you can see how fooSwift works now.

Taking a step back, to deal with char ** in Swift, we overcame 2 obstacles:

The difference in string representation between C and Swift.
Compared to C pointers, Swift's inout expresses mutability of function arguments in a more restricted way. We can't nest inouts to represent the infinite layers of indirections that pointers achieve.