SWIFT ABI Essentials: How to Maximize Your App's Efficiency
summary
Explains Swift ABI components with concrete evidence: inspects Swift compiler source and emits SIL analysis test cases (dozen+ small programs) and shares code on GitHub. Demonstrates that generic specialization yields measured speedups — about 1.5× for classes, ~10× (sometimes 11–12×) for structs — and that protocol-extension dispatch can outperform protocol-interface dispatch by over 100×; also shows the cost of Objective‑C exposure and how final/dynamic/objc modifiers change dispatch and inlining via the LLVM backend.
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chapters (16)
- 0:00Intro
- 1:25Agenda
- 1:44Swift compiler
- 4:12Swift ABI (Application Binary Interface)
- 6:34How to get ABI details
- 7:29Data Layout
- 9:08Existential containers
- 10:54Storing opaque types
- 12:14Type metadata
- 15:07Method dispatch STATIC
- 18:59Method dispatch DYNAMIC
- 22:44Protocol’s extensions method dispatch
- 24:14Message dispatch
- 26:35Dispatch behaviour specifiers
- 29:01Live examples
- 35:54Contact
