Apple has announced that the Swift benchmark suite is now open source.
The suite contains code for benchmarks, libraries and utilities designed to help track its programming language’s performance and catch performance regressions.
The Swift benchmark suite contains 75 benchmarks covering several important Swift workloads; it has libraries providing commonly needed benchmarking functions, a driver for running benchmarks and displaying performance metrics, and a utility for comparing benchmark metrics across Swift versions.
Apple is encouraging developers to run Swift’s benchmark suite against their changes before asking for pull requests in order to catch potential performance regressions.
In a blog, Apple engineer Luke Larson said that in the future, Apple is trying to add support to Swift’s continuous integration system for running benchmarks on pull requests.
According to the blog, the contributions to Swift benchmark suite can include Pull requests for new benchmarks covering performance critical workloads, additions to benchmark helper libraries and other improvements.
Swift is a general-purpose programming language built using a modern approach to safety, performance and software design patterns.
It was introduced by Apple in 2014 along with iOS 8 and OS X. It has been built for iOS, OS X, watchOS and tvOS and is designed to work with Cocoa and Cocoa Touch Frameworks.
In December, 2015, Apple announced to open source Swift language. The language, supporting libraries, debugger and package manager were published under Apache license with Runtime Library Exception.
Swift has been designed to be programmed for several platforms including mobile apps, desktop apps, scaling up to cloud services.
Swift has features that make it easier to read and write code and also gives the developer complete control.
With its inferred types, the coding in Swift is cleaner and less prone to mistakes while eliminating headers and providing namespaces instead.
The new project is now being handled by Swift.org and the source code can be obtained on GitHub.
At present, Swift can be used across Mac to target all Apple platforms including iOS, OS X, watchOS, tvOS, etc.
Swift can even be used on Linux to build Swift libraries and applications. The open source binary builds provide Swift complier and standard library, core libraries and Swift debugger.
