Swift makes it relatively easy to format numbers as byte counts, with appropriate suffixes to indicate units and generally sensible auto-selection of scale factors. e.g.: 1 kB (in English – results may vary depending on locale) This is just a small subset of Swift’s FormatStyle-based formatting capabilities, with which I have a bit of a… Read more
I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with Swift’s FormatStyle-based formatting capabilities. 42% (in English – results may vary depending on locale) On the pro side: But the cons are rough: All in all, there’s a reason fuckingformatstyle.com exists (and don’t forget to tip!).
APFS (like many modern file systems but unlike its predecessor HFS+) supports copy-on-write. This means you can logically copy a file – it looks and behaves like a distinct file – but it doesn’t immediately copy the file’s contents on disk – it merely shares them with the original. Only if and as you modify… Read more
A few weeks ago, Axel Roest published a simple web server comparison, that turned out to not be doing what it was thought to be doing. Figuring that out was a very interesting discussion that warrants a retrospective, to look at which parts were particularly helpful and which not so much. Tangentially, I want to… Read more
The following code prints the Fibonacci sequence. You’ve probably seen it before. It’s one of the simplest and most well-known examples of a sliding window operation – where the next value depends on the preceding two (or more) values. While almost all programs do not calculate the Fibonacci sequence, many do contain similar sliding-window algorithms.… Read more
What’s the best way to read a stream of bytes with URLSession? That’s the simple question I set out to answer. I wrote some benchmarks. They read a 128 MiB file and perform a contrived aggregation of its content bytes (a joking “hash” of them, merely to ensure the actual reads aren’t optimised out). ⚠️… Read more
By which I mean, things like ContinuousClock and SuspendingClock. In absolute terms they don’t have much overhead – think sub-microsecond for most uses. Which makes them perfectly acceptable when they’re used sporadically (e.g. only a few times per second). However, if you need to deal with time and timing more frequently, their inefficiency can become… Read more