Swift: Introducing the Benchmark Package: Complementing Unit Tests with Performance Checks

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In the world of software development, the old adage “make it work, make it right, make it fast” serves as a guiding principle for creating robust, efficient applications. This journey starts with ensuring that our code functions as intended, a task where unit and integration testing have proven indispensable. However, ensuring functionality is only part of the equation. The true measure of an application’s excellence extends into its performance - how fast and efficiently it operates under various conditions. Herein lies the critical but often overlooked third step: making it fast.

In the realm of professional trading software, the role of a comprehensive benchmarking framework integrated with Continuous Integration (CI) parallels the importance of unit and integration testing. Just as unit and integration tests are essential for ensuring the functional correctness of software, benchmarking within a CI pipeline is crucial for continuously validating the non-functional aspects, such as high throughput, low latency, predictable performance and consistent resource usage. This is vital for maintaining the competitive edge in a fast-paced financial environment where the extreme market data rates and performance requirements means that even small variations in response time - on the scale of microseconds - can significantly impact trade outcomes.

Performance is an important part of the overall product regardless of the application domain, no end user wants to wait on a computer or other electronic device, instant response to user operations truly helps provide a delightful end user experience.

After examining the existing infrastructure within the Swift ecosystem, we concluded that there were no existing solutions meeting our needs for multi-platform and rich metrics support, CI integration, and developer-friendliness. Therefore, we decided to develop a Benchmark package and...

Get the full details here: Swift.org - Introducing the Benchmark Package: Complementing Unit Tests with Performance Checks