Apple’s new Swift programming language tested: performs multiple times faster than Objective-C

Apple took the wraps off a brand new programming language at its WWDC 2014 conference, and it promised a much faster performance and a modern, streamlined syntax over the currently used Objective-C. And while that would sound like a dream to developers, Apple did not reveal much about the upcoming Swift language and actual compile performance tests.

In fact, we’ve seen early tests show how Swift is actually outperformed by Objective-C on many popular benchmarks. Luckily, we’re still in the beta phases of its development, and knowing the Apple way of doing things, we can expect the improvements to show fully only in the final one.

Now, however, the latest, optimized builds of Swift got tested, and while the early tests showed it was in fact slower than Objective-C on many occasions, these new results show a shockingly different picture. We’re seeing improvements of multiple times in sort operations, and it seems the magic stems from LLVM and Clang compiler optimizations.

Right below, you’d find the tables showing how the performance of Swift evolved to its current state in the latest optimized version, and how it compares to Objective-C. Take a look below.


source: Jesse Quires