Use .hidden() when you want to use a view only for layout purposes – never shown nor interacted with. It doesn’t respond to custom animations for example.

Thanks! I like your changes.

Yeah, it’s a bit tangential to the point I was focused on – using EmptyView – but I did spend a little time trying to figure out what the hidden modifier actually does. i.e. does it just do opacity(0)? The way Apple talks about it, it sounds like that’s actually the case. But they never actually state it unequivocally. So I’m not certain what the difference might be; thus why I didn’t recommend one over the other.

Unfortunately, I can’t find the implementation of the hidden modifier. It doesn’t seem to be part of the SwiftUI framework – no symbol entry for it. So maybe it’s always inlined? But I couldn’t find a source definition of it either, in the Xcode SDKs.

Post updated. I stopped short of providing a “real” example of where AnyView(EmptyView()) makes obvious sense, as the view body needs to be pretty non-trivial before you reach that point. But, I did try to spell out fundamentally why you might end up in that situation. Hopefully it all makes sense now. Let me know if anything remains unclear.

It’s true, in the highly simplified example I showed here you don’t need to use AnyView. I’ll revise it a bit to better show a situation where you do. Thanks for your feedback on this – it’s an important point and I’m glad to improve this post’s clarity.

I’m not sure of the exact mechanics, but you can opt-out of “ViewBuilder” mode, intentionally or not. e.g. if you explicit return. And I find that’s sometimes unavoidable (in a pragmatic sense – you can always contrive some amount of conditional logic that will effectively mimic early returns, but it can get ugly and IMO isn’t worth the trade-off merely to avoid AnyView – especially given the lack of any apparent real downside to AnyView in terms of performance.

Note that use of AnyView is required in order to accomodate the SwiftUI View protocol requirement that body always return the same type of view.

This is generally not necessary. The body property is implicitly annotated with @ViewBuilder (through the View protocol). So the usual ViewBuilder rules apply, i.e. you don‘t have to use AnyView nor does your if let require an else branch.

Both of these variants work too:

    var body: some View {
        if let model {
            Text("Hello")
        } else {
            EmptyView()
        }
    }

    var body: some View {
        if let model {
            Text("Hello")
        }
    }

For your own properties or functions, you can also mark them @ViewBuilder to get the same result. Example:

    @ViewBuilder var myHelperView: some View {
        if let model {
            Text("Hello")
        }
    }