Apple open-sources Swift benchmarking suite

Apple on Monday took its Swift benchmark suite open source, providing developers access to a wide-ranging set of tools designed to track project performance and catch bugs in code written in the company's fledgling programming language.

Announced by Luke Larson on Apple's official Swift blog, the toolkit currently up on GitHub includes 75 benchmarks related to commonly used Swift workloads, libraries for various benchmarking functions, a driver for running said benchmarks and a utility for comparing metrics across Swift versions.

As an open source asset, Apple encourages developers to contribute improvements like new benchmarks covering performance critical workloads, additions to helper libraries and general system improvements.

Looking ahead, Larson said plans are in motion to include benchmark pull requests in Swift's continuous integration system. Powered by Jenkins, Apple's CI builds and runs tests on OS X and iOS simulators, as well as Ubuntu 14.04 and 15.10, to monitor project progress and review changes.

Swift was introduced as a successor to Objective-C in a surprise announcement at WWDC 2014. The programming language went open source in December under an Apache license in hopes of boosting adoption and adding new features derived from the developer community.