[UPDATE - Swift 1.2 from Xcode 6.3 Beta 2 brings performance benefits to non-final properties and methods making final unnecessary for performance from that time - see my initial reaction to Beta 2. I still recommend final where possible as it avoids need to consider effects of an object being subclassed and methods overwritten that change the behaviour.]

This post is intended to quantify, explain and show the performance hit that you take from not adding the word final to your classes (or their properties and methods). The post was triggered by a blog post complaining about Swift performance and showing some performance figures where Swift was significantly slower than Objective-C. In the optimised builds that gap could be closed just by adding a single final keyword. I'm grateful to David Owens for showing the code he was having trouble and giving me a base to demonstrate the difference final can make without it being me cherry picking any code of my choosing.

As with most performance issues this doesn't matter most of the time. Most code is waiting on user input, network responses or other slow things and it really doesn't matter that much if the code is being accessed a few times a second. However when you have got performance critical code and in particular that inner loop that is being executed hundreds of thousands of times a second it can make a huge difference.

What does final do

Read more »

I've given my Beyond if let talk based on my How I Handle Optionals blog post about handling optionals in Swift twice this week. I was probably a more dynamic speaker in the NSLondon talk but the content is pretty similar. I may have been a bit slower and more methodical at the Swift London one though. Let me know if anything isn't clear in either of them or if you have any tips or suggestions (speaking  or Swift).

Vimeo of talk at NSLondon. Questions from 13:30. [Updated to replace Livestream feed with this.]

Read more »

When Swift's access controls were introduced I wrote about how they worked like C's with good use of internal and external headers. I've recently been asked about how to do access private properties when subclassing and thought it would be worth sharing the conversation.

If you are new to Swift's access controls I suggest you look at the previous post (same link as above) first as this is the refinement and conclusion (in my mind) of an issue that I an open question when I wrote that. If you are new to programming then this post is probably one to skip as it is more about comparing how things can be done in Swift that people are used to doing a certain way in Java than something meant as an introduction to the concepts.

I’ve a question in context of open/closed principle (Software entitles should be open for extension but closed for modification.), coming from Java, AS3 background highly influenced by the Design Patterns book by the Gang of Four, the way I see protected is so that work can be extended by other people. 

How can I fully extend a class in it’s entirety without access to it’s private members, surely I can override methods but that won’t be enough.

The only way I could think is to approach this by declaring everything public or have a getter setter for each but then I’m violating “Encapsulation” principle

Read more »

AssertingNilCoalescing Operator !!

I believe that Swift needs one more operator to deal with optionals, in this post I present my concept to make dealing with them better and safer. It isn't a beginners introduction to optionals or Swift. There are plenty of good ones out there already.

infix operator !! { associativity right precedence 110 }
public func !!<A>(lhs:A?, rhs:@autoclosure()->A)->A {
    assert(lhs != nil)
    return lhs ?? rhs()
}

How this code works will be explained near the end of this post so don't feel you need to understand it now. It adds an additional operator !! to a Swift project for dealing with optionals. It is designed to retain the benefits of strong typing proving the validity of some aspects of the code while documenting the expectation that the left hand argument will not be nil and exposing (in debug builds only) if that belief about the code is wrong.

Unlike other operators it behaves differently in a debug build than a release build. In release builds it is exactly the same as the built in ?? nil coalescing operator return the argument on the left unless it is nil in which case the right hand argument will be returned.

Read more »

Swift arrays are not necessarily contiguous blocks of memory (although they may be in some cases so some code may work in some cases but not in others). Some operations may trigger them to be converted to a contiguous block of memory and I believe that is what can particularly cause issues when there is access from multiple threads.

[Update - This post is more popular than I expected (thanks Reddit). I've added some additional notes at the bottom. Also the previous post about optimisation is probably more interesting and valuable.]

Even the code as described here may not work (and I haven't tested at all) when there are multiple reads or writes that access the same elements of the array. All the code I used was either reading from a constant array (safe from multiple threads/queues) or writing into non-overlapping ranges with no reads occurring (only seems safe with the technique described here).

.withUnsafeMutableBufferPointer

Read more »

Update (23rd October 2014) - Now with video link HERE.

Swift optimisation presentation refined and developed further.

Please contact me if you want the source version and please let me know if you make use of it or find it useful.

Description of the demo from a previous event. Note that for Xcode 6.1 you will need to use the 0x, 1x, 2x and fullSpeedXC61 branches instead of the 0, 1, 2 and fullSpeed branches respectively. Likewise master currently has an Xcode 6.1 version although I will probably merge that to the real master shortly.

If you've watched the WWDC video you will already know this but if you just look at the class references it isn't obvious that . iOS 8 introduced the possibility to request permission to access location only while the App is in the foreground which should encourage users to grant permission without fear of being tracked inappropriately however the foreground only mode only works with some of the modes. This slide from the talk (WWDC 2014 What's New In Core Location - Session 706) is the key one:

Download LocationAuthorisation-Session706WWDC14.pdf

Read more »

I posted about the results of some experiments I had done using the iOS background modes for Bluetooth. At the time I hadn't updated any devices to iOS8 (and they would have been betas anyway). This is a quick update to confirm that there are no changes in these areas that I can see in iOS8.

If you do know of any iOS8 changes or workarounds to the issues described please let me know

Basic Findings (repeated from earlier article)

1. Apps on BLE capable iOS devices can be woken from the background when a device with the correct UUID is detected even when they have been completely removed from memory due to other apps needing the memory.
2. This background listening/advertising state is stopped if the app is deliberately closed by the user swiping it up from the task switcher.
3. The background listening/advertising state is stopped if the device is switched off or runs out of battery. It isn't restarted until the App is run again. (I haven't actually retested running out of battery but am guessing it is the same as manually powering off I will try to test again when the battery on something is getting low)

Please see the previous article for discussion of the impact on on app design and some potential workarounds.

Read more »