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

REPL


REPL stands for read-eval-print-loop. Swift REPL is an interactive Swift code interpreter that executes code immediately. To launch Swift REPL, open Terminal. app and execute this command:

$ xcrun swift

Now, you can start typing Swift code and see the result. A nice thing about evaluating code in REPL is that if you make an error that would eventually stop the application execution if you compile and run it, you can still continue evaluating the code and preserve all of the progress. Let's play around and try this code in Swift REPL:

let a = 10
let b = a + "c"
let b = a + 10

Writing code in the REPL console is not as convenient as in the modern Xcode IDE, but being familiar with it is a useful skill. On top of the Swift REPL, Apple has built more powerful tools, such as Playgrounds, which has a nice source code editor and flexibility of Swift REPL.