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:

1. How can a new programming language be so much faster?
2. Do the Objective-C results from a bad compiler or is there something less efficient in Objective-C than Swift?
3. How would you explain a 40% performance increase? I understand that garbage collection/automated reference control might produce some additional overhead, but this much?

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:

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

Apple launched its new programming language Swift today. 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 working on some 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? In this example, surely you just have a bad Objective-C compiler or you're doing something in a less efficient way? How else would you explain a 40% performance increase? I understand that garbage collection/automated reference control might produce some additional overhead, but this much?

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:

1. How can a new programming language be so much faster?
2. Do the Objective-C results from a bad compiler or is there something less efficient in Objective-C than Swift?
3. How would you explain a 40% performance increase? I understand that garbage collection/automated reference control might produce some additional overhead, but this much?