Book Image

Swift High Performance

By : Kostiantyn Koval
Book Image

Swift High Performance

By: Kostiantyn Koval

Overview of this book

Swift is one of the most popular and powerful programming languages for building iOS and Mac OS applications, and continues to evolve with new features and capabilities. Swift is considered a replacement to Objective-C and has performance advantages over Objective-C and Python. Swift adopts safe programming patterns and adds modern features to make programming easier, more flexible, and more fun. Develop Swift and discover best practices that allow you to build solid applications and optimize their performance. First, a few of performance characteristics of Swift will be explained. You will implement new tools available in Swift, including Playgrounds and REPL. These will improve your code efficiency, enable you to analyse Swift code, and enhance performance. Next, the importance of building solid applications using multithreading concurrency and multi-core device architecture is covered, before moving on to best practices and techniques that you should utilize when building high performance applications, such as concurrency and lazy-loading. Finally, you will explore the underlying structure of Swift further, and learn how to disassemble and compile Swift code.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Swift High Performance
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Value types and immutability


There are two different data types in Swift:

  • Reference types

  • Value types

Let's take a look at these.

Reference types

A class is a reference type. When you create an instance of a reference type and assign it to a variable or constant, you are not only assigning a value but also a reference that points to the value, which is located somewhere else (actually it is located in the heap memory). When you pass that reference to other functions and assign it to other variables, you are creating multiple references that point to the same data. If one of those variables changes the data, that change will reflect in all other variables as well. Here's an example that shows this:

let person = Person(firstName: "Sam", lastName: "Jakson")
let a = person, b = person, c = person

The following diagram shows what the memory for this code would look like:

All four constants would refer to the same object. The danger in this architecture is that if one of those constants updates a piece...