How can Swift be so much faster than Objective-C?
- by Yellow
Apple launched its new programming language Swift today. In the presentation, they made some performance comparisons between Objective-C and Python. The following is a picture of one of their slides, of a comparison of those three languages performing some complex object sort:
There was an even more incredible graph about a performance comparison working on some encryption algorithm. Obviously this is a marketing talk, and they didn't go into detail on how this was implemented in each. I leaves me wondering though: how can a new programming language be so much faster? In this example, surely you just have a bad Objective-C compiler or you're doing something in a less efficient way? How else would you explain a 40% performance increase? I understand that garbage collection/automated reference control might produce some additional overhead, but this much?
