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

The Swift compilation process and swiftc


The compilation of the Swift source code is quite an interesting process, and it involves several steps. The Swift compiler uses LLVM for optimization and binary generation. To better understand the entire process, refer to this flow diagram:

First, the Swift source code is transformed into an AST (short for Abstract Syntax Tree). Then, it is transformed into SIL (short for Swift Intermediate Language), first into a raw SIL and then into a canonical SIL. After that, it is transformed into LLVM IR (short for Intermediate Representation). In this step, LLVM takes care of the rest. It takes IR, does an optimization, and produces an assembly and, after that, an executable for a specific architecture.

The interesting part in preceding diagram is the steps for generating SIL. It's a Swift-specific optimization and it was created specifically for swift. Other programming languages, such as C, don't do this optimization before they generate LLVM IR, and...