NSCopyObject is a very old Foundation function – pre-dating Mac OS X entirely; from the NeXT era – that was originally basically just memcpy, but now it’s complicated. A lot more complicated… Read more
Five years ago installing Swift on a Raspberry Pi – or really any non-Apple platform – was fairly involved. Compared to getting a Raspberry Pi working to begin with it was easy, but still a far cry from apt install swift. Sadly it’s still not quite that easy (and some Python package is squatting on… Read more
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!).
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