How can Swift be so much faster than Objective-C in these comparisons?
- by Yellow
Apple launched its new programming language Swift at WWDC14. 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 using the RC4 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?
Are the Objective-C results caused by a bad compiler or is there something less efficient in Objective-C than Swift?
How would you explain a 40% performance increase? I understand that garbage collection/automated reference control might produce some additional overhead, but this much?