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I feels like I must be missing something. 3ms is extremely slow. Surely it should be 3us, no? What’s it doing that is so slow?
> The concept behind zconform is to eagerly load all possible protocol conformances and store them in a map keyed by the protocol’s address in memory. if it works well in most scenarios, couldn't this just be implemented directly in the swift runtime at some point?
Maybe, but Swift is intentionally lazy in lots of ways (globals aren't initialized until the first access, for example). The trade-off of zconform's approach is that dynamic linking is slowed down by needing to eagerly identify all protocol conformances whenever an image is loaded (including conformances which are never even cast). It does make the performance of dynamic casting more deterministic, but it would slow…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Probably because that is one of the states goals as voiced by the languages creator
That was a long time ago, I thought. The word "systems" was removed from the swift website years ago when it was clear that it did not really have that priority.
> Fast. Swift is intended as a replacement for C-based languages (C, C++, and Objective-C). As such, Swift must be comparable to those languages in performance for most tasks. Performance must also be predictable and consistent, not just fast in short bursts that require clean-up later. There are lots of languages with novel features — being fast is rare.
Those are literally the stated goals. It does not get more clear than saying "Swift is intended to be a replacement for C-based languages (C, C++)..."