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surprised to see swift 4 times as slow as non-optimized go.

Anyone has an explanation ?

I know the swift string type is really complex, but i always assumed it was at least performing well..

Reading anything at all into the relative performance of these programs written by different people which are all doing radically different things seems like a gigantic waste of time.

Some of these “simple” versions are custom-specifying allocators to minimize memory overhead and doing highly optimizable ASCII value manipulations and doing byte-equality on strings, rather than go through slower Unicode libraries. The “simple” Swift version is doing nothing at all to avoid generating many allocations/deallocations and running fully Unicode-aware algorithms to lower the input and perform Unicode-normalized string comparisons, it’s totally apples-to-oranges stuff.

i was wondering if this was due to unicode indeed. I had hoped that the benchmarks required languages to perform the same kinds of string check, otherwise there's really no point indeed.

In case you miss it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32220587

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