Slides, video and links related to my Swift Summit talk on Swift performance. Video should be available later is now available and it might be worth watching Airspeed's talk that preceded mine before watching it when it is available I'm also expecting a blog post from him shortly on his static vs. compile time talk which is also highly relevant to optimisation.

The key point in Swift is that as the compiler gets better there is no need to choose between nice code and fast code. With a little thought and knowledge it is usually possible to get close to the speed of lowish level C code with nice abstractions. Some may say that C++ is there already but I enjoy writing Swift code much more and C++ is hampered by it's C legacy and choices made many years ago (for good reasons) from becoming a truly nice language in my view (non-Nullable by default would be hard to retrofit for example).

There were also many other excellent talks at Swift Summit, and all were at least good. I'm looking forward to watching several again.

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Parsing JSON in Swift without adding libraries could be tricky and annoying at least until nil coalescing was added and optional chaining was upgraded late in the original betas but that really isn't the case at least since Swift 1.0 was final. There are clearly a wide range of JSON libraries for Swift ranging from SwiftyJSON which just tidies up extractions from deep in nested structures to Argo which will feel comfortable for those coming from Haskell and look clever but be hard to read for those not familiar with the syntax.

I want to show people that there is really nothing very tricky or ugly about parsing JSON data in Swift even without libraries to help.

This post was trigger by seeing Jameson Quave's new lightweight Luma library and the syntax in the project readme (at the time of writing) would work without a added library on the result of parsing with Cocoa's included NSJSONSerialization class. Please note that there is nothing wrong with the Luma library or anything I have seen written about it but I wanted to make clear how lightweight it is and how easy these things are to do without using a library at all.

I confirmed that the syntax was available in the Playground without using the library and there is no problem just using exactly the same syntax on the dictionary you get back from NSJSONSerialization as in the Luma example. The only difference in the presentation of printing the parsed structures.

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This post is a response to David Owens' Swift Resistance Explored post.

First I want to acknowledge that Swift Debug builds are hideously slow. This isn't news to me or anyone who has seen my talk on Swift optimisation. To be clear this is a problem which Apple have said that they are working on but I still don't think it is an absolute block on any real development because there are fairly simple workarounds.

If you want to see the code under discussion it is all in my repository here with a log of my development. The first commit is the Zipfile that David made available in his blog post, the rest is my testing and development of the Swift version.

These are my performance figures (for 100 runs so it isn't directly comparable to David's):

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[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

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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.]

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