Apple embraces open source for Swift Benchmark Suite

Within two months of taking its programming language Swift to open source, Apple has released the Swift Benchmark Suite for the developers.

With this, the developers will get access to source code for benchmarks, libraries, and utilities designed to help track Swift performance and catch performance regressions.

In an official blog post, Apple's Luke Larson announced the suite is made available on Github, a repository of hosting services, libraries and source codes. "The suite includes 75 benchmarks covering a number of important Swift workloads, 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. We look forward to working with the Swift community to make Swift as fast as possible," Larson wrote.

Going further, Apple plans to include and support benchmark pull requests in Swift's continuous integration system. Swift is a programming language for iOS, OS X, tvOS, and watchOS, built over C and Objective-C. In 2014, during a developer conference, Apple introduced Swift 1.0, as its new programming language for developing iOS and OS X apps.

Recently, Tobie Index, a ranking site of all programming languages, had ranked Swift as the 15th most popular programming language globally. Popular internet sites like Vine, LinkedIn, Getty Images, Slack, Dow Jones, and Yahoo, are said to be using this language.

This announcement is of huge significance to both developers and Apple customers. Taking this suite to open source would mean easy and wider access for developers, who would test and build more applications for the Apple device. In 2015, Apple customers had spent over $20bn (€17.8bn, £13.8bn) on the App Store downloading and purchasing apps and games. According to a press note, worldwide, the App Store generated $40bn for developers since 2008, with over one-third generated in 2015.