Swift Resistance

owensd

I feel like every time I sit down to actually start using Swift, I'm constantly battling with the language. My latest challenge: creating a backing buffer of pixel data that will be rendered to the screen.

This really shouldn't be a difficult thing to do, so hopefully someone can point out the obvious thing I'm doing wrong in Swift so that my performance is so terrible.

Here's the basic code that I wanted to profile (of course, there is a version for each of the languages):

void RenderWeirdGradient(BackingBuffer *buffer)
{
    for (int y = 0; y < buffer->height; ++y) {
        int row = y * buffer->width;
        for (int x = 0; x < buffer->width; ++x) {
            Pixel p = { 0, y + GreenOffset, x + BlueOffset, 255 };
            buffer->data[row + x] = p;
        }
    }
}

- (void)drawRect:(NSRect)dirtyRect
{
    CFTimeInterval start = CACurrentMediaTime();

    if (buffer.data) {
        RenderWeirdGradient(&buffer);

        CGContextRef contextRef = [[NSGraphicsContext currentContext] graphicsPort];
        assert(contextRef != NULL);

        NSData *data = [NSData dataWithBytesNoCopy:buffer.data
                                            length:buffer.width * buffer.height * sizeof(Pixel)
                                      freeWhenDone:NO];
        CGDataProviderRef providerRef = CGDataProviderCreateWithCFData((CFDataRef)data);

        CGImageRef imageRef = CGImageCreate(buffer.width, buffer.height,
                                            buffer.bitsPerComponent,
                                            buffer.bitsPerPixel,
                                            sizeof(Pixel) * buffer.width,
                                            buffer.colorSpace,
                                            buffer.bitmapInfo,
                                            providerRef,
                                            NULL,
                                            true,
                                            kCGRenderingIntentDefault);

        CGContextDrawImage(contextRef, NSMakeRect(0, 0, buffer.width, buffer.height), imageRef);

        CGImageRelease(imageRef);
        CGDataProviderRelease(providerRef);
    }

    CFTimeInterval elapsed = CACurrentMediaTime() - start;
    NSLog(@"elapsed: %f", elapsed);
}

Hopefully the code is straight forward, basically it just renders a window that looks the picture below with the pattern moving at each update call.

![window with blue-green gradient squares][window_pic]

Let's just start with the timings…

|———————–|———–|

| Language | Timing |

|:———————-|———-:|

| ObjC (NO ARC, -O0) | 0.01137s |

| ObjC (NO ARC, -Os) | 0.01051s |

|———————————–|

| ObjC (ARC, -O0) | 0.01159s |

| ObjC (ARC, -Os) | 0.00983s |

|———————————–|

| Swift * (ARC, -Onone) | 0.03005s |

| Swift * (ARC, -O) | 0.01707s |

|———————————–|

| Swift [] (ARC, -Onone)| 1.19796s |

| Swift [] (ARC, -O) | 0.02701s |

|———————————–|

: style="width: 50%"

The "Swift *" is a version that uses UnsafeMutablePointer<UInt8> to handle the buffer. The "Swift []" is one that uses an array of pixel data, where pixel is simply a struct:

struct Pixel {
    var red: Byte       = 0x00
    var green: Byte     = 0x00
    var blue: Byte      = 0x00
    var alpha: Byte     = 0xFF
}

OK… that is not a freaking typo up there. It literally takes 1.2 SECONDS to render each frame. Both ObjC versions did it in 0.01s and even the pointer version of Swift only took 0.03s seconds.

THAT IS 120 TIMES SLOWER!!!!

I can hear you now: oh, that's a debug build, you should always do your performance profiling with optimizations on.

My answer is this: I'm not trying to profile the app, I'm simply trying to build a small game. I cannot do it because the performance is so flipping terrible in debug mode. Trying to debug your app with optimized code is just a pain. Sure, at the end of the project, that's probably the right thing to be doing, but until you get there, builds without optimizations are just so much easier to work with.

So what are we to do?

Well… if you want to use Swift, you have to bang your head against your desk and try different things until something gets better. In this case, I can make the performance significantly better (though, let's be honest here, it's still

37 TIMES slower than the ObjC version):

func renderWeirdGradient(blueOffset: Int, _ greenOffset: Int) {
    for var y = 0; y < buffer.height; y++ {
        let row = y * buffer.width
        for var x = 0; x < buffer.width; x++ {
            // Simply using the "FAST" code block changes the timing from 1.2s
            // per call to 0.37s per call.

            // ---- SLOW CODE BLOCK
            buffer.pixels[row + x].green = Byte((y + greenOffset) & 0xFF)
            buffer.pixels[row + x].blue = Byte((y + blueOffset) & 0xFF)
            // ---- END SLOW CODE BLOCK

            // ---- FASTER CODE BLOCK
            let pixel = Pixel(
                red: 0,
                green: Byte((y + greenOffset) & 0xFF),
                blue: Byte((x + blueOffset) & 0xFF),
                alpha: 255)

            buffer.pixels[row + x] = pixel
            // ---- END FASTER CODE BLOCK
        }
    }

    self.needsDisplay = true
}

I ran into this same type of stuff when I was working on the JSON parser. The fundamental problem with Swift, with regards to performance, is that it is impossible to reason what the performance of your code is going to be. It is impossible to know if your code is just horrendously slow in debug, or if the optimizing is going to get ride of all of the extra crap that is going on.

This sucks.

What I'm Left With

Seriously, what are we supposed to be doing here? Is it actually possible to build highly responsive apps that process a lot of complex information in Swift?

If most of your code is Swift code that is simply bridging into ObjC or C, you will probably read this post and not have a clue what I'm talking about. You are benefiting from the speed of ObjC.

The sad state of affairs is that, today, Swift is slow. I don't see that changing by next WWDC.

Swift Source: https://github.com/owensd/handmade-swift/tree/day005_badperf

ObjC Projects: BackingBufferObjC.zip

Swift Resistance