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

Swift code compilation


The LLVM first turns your source code into pseudocode. In the next step it gets optimized and compiled into Assembly code.

You can perform these code-processing steps manually from the command line by using swiftc in the Swift compiler. To see all available options for the Swift compiler, open Terminal.app and execute the --help command:

xcrun swiftc --help

You will see the available compilation modes and options. The ones we are looking for are:

  • -emit-assembly

  • -emit-ir

  • -emit-silgen

  • -emit-sil

These compilation modes allow you to apply different compilation steps to the Swift source file. As an example, we could emit sourceFile.swift into the canonical SIL representation and write the result to the outputFile with this command:

swiftc -emit-sil sourceFile.swift -o outputFile

We will cover the compilation process in greater detail in Chapter 8, Discovering All the Underlying Swift Power.