The raw value syntax for enums in Swift is “just” a shorthand for conformance to the RawRepresentable protocol. It’s easy to add this manually if you want to use otherwise unsupported types as raw values.

When you define an enum in Swift, you can choose to have each enum case “backed” by a raw value. For example, here’s an enum that models the terrain type of a map tile in a game, and each case has a raw value of type String (perhaps because these values are used to encode the information on disk):

enum Terrain: String {
    case forest = "F"
    case mountain = "M"
    case water = "W"
}

You can access an instance’s raw value through the rawValue property, and there’s a failable initializer to construct an enum value from a raw value (the initializer returns nil if you pass in an invalid raw value).

Raw values don’t change how enums are stored

Note that adding raw values to an enum doesn’t affect how the enum is laid out in memory. The compiler always determines how many bits it needs to discriminate between all enum cases and then assigns a unique integer tag value to each case. Even for enums with integer raw values, this tag is not the same as the raw value — they are completely different things. This also means you don’t have to worry that an enum with strings as raw values will take up more memory than a “plain” enum — the constant strings are only stored once in the binary, not for each instance.

We can test this by checking the size in memory of a Terrain value: it’s 1 byte. (Theoretically, an enum with three cases requires only 2 bits of storage, but every value occupies a multiple of 1 byte.) In contrast, a String containing the corresponding raw value takes up 24 bytes (plus the actual storage for the string’s contents, but that’s statically located in the binary in both cases):¹

MemoryLayout.size(ofValue: Terrain.forest) // → 1 (byte)
MemoryLayout.size(ofValue: "F") // → 24 (bytes)

Syntactic sugar for RawRepresentable conformance

In fact, the raw value syntax is simply shorthand for conforming the enum to the RawRepresentable protocol, which defines the rawValue property and initializer. When you define the above enum, the compiler generates code equivalent to this:

enum Terrain {
    case forest
    case mountain
    case water
}

extension Terrain: RawRepresentable {
    typealias RawValue = String

    init?(rawValue: RawValue) {
        switch rawValue {
        case "F": self = .forest
        case "M": self = .mountain
        case "W": self = .water
        default: return nil
        }
    }

    var rawValue: RawValue {
        switch self {
        case .forest: return "F"
        case .mountain: return "M"
        case .water: return "W"
        }
    }
}

This does exactly the same as the shorthand syntax and should make clear that the raw values don’t affect the enum’s storage.

More options with manual conformance

Once you realize that there’s no magic behind enums with raw values, it opens up the possibility to use all kinds of types as raw values. In the shorthand syntax, raw values can only be String, Character, or any integer or floating-point number type. Moreover, the values you provide must be literals, i.e. they must be statically known at compile time.

The RawRepresentable protocol has no such limitation — its RawValue associated type can be anything, and the actual raw values can be created dynamically at runtime. Take this example of an enum for modeling colors, backed by their correspoding UIColor values:

import UIKit

// Can’t use the shorthand syntax for UIColor raw values
enum Color {
    case red
    case green
    case blue
}

// But it’s no problem with manual RawRepresentable conformance
extension Color: RawRepresentable {
    typealias RawValue = UIColor

    init?(rawValue: RawValue) {
        switch rawValue {
        case UIColor.red: self = .red
        case UIColor.green: self = .green
        case UIColor.blue: self = .blue
        default: return nil
        }
    }

    var rawValue: RawValue {
        switch self {
        case .red: return UIColor.red
        case .green: return UIColor.green
        case .blue: return UIColor.blue
        }
    }
}

// Access a color's rawValue
Color.blue.rawValue is UIColor
// → true

RawRepresentable is more than just enums

RawRepresentable isn’t limited to enums. It can also make sense for structs and classes to add conformance. Option sets also make use of the protocol (OptionSet inherits from RawRepresentable).