Swift sucks at web serving… or does it?

Chart showing throughput (requests per second) over number of concurrent requests, for four different web servers (representing the programming languages JavaScript, PHP, Kotlin - erroneously labelled as Java on the chart - and Swift).

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

-fomit-frame-pointer

Explanatory diagram of frame pointers, showing a link from the x86-64 register %rbp to the start of the current frame, which holds the prior value of %rbp that points to the top of the previous frame, and so on.

This is an elaboration of a post I made in a Swift Forums thread, SE-0419: Swift Backtracing API. The question was raised whether an official Swift backtracer should try to support code that doesn’t use frame pointers. Which immediately raised the question – in my mind – of if anyone is still using the “optimisation”… Read more