iOS and macOS Performance Tuning ─ Cocoa, Cocoa Touch, Objective-C, and Swift

Suddenly, program optimization is crucial again. Yesterday’s “automatic” increases in computer performance have effectively stopped. iOS devices such as the iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, and Apple TV have dramatically fewer resources: their limited resources must be used as frugally as possible. Now, in Cocoa and Objective-C Performance,Marcel Weiher draws on more than 20 years of experience optimizing software for Apple devices, drilling down to the code level to systematically address optimization of CPU, memory, disk and network I/O and graphics.

The only book focused entirely on Cocoa and Objective-C performance optimization, this book is strongly empirically based, identifying concrete issues that can be discovered via measurement, and then addressed through the application of specific techniques and a deep understanding of proven underlying principles.

Weiher presents insights you won’t find anywhere else – most of which can be easily applied to both Mac and iOS development. He also identifies a series of common pitfalls and misconceptions associated with OS X and iOS performance, revealing why they are wrong, explaining the actual realities, and showing developers how to reflect those realities in more efficient code.

Marcel Weiher is a developer with more than 20 years of Objective-C and 17 years of NeXT/Cocoa experience. He has always pushed performance boundaries, whether it was ripping 90MB PostScript files into 128MB raster images buffers on 32MB NeXTStations, database-publishing the several-thousand page ISBN directories, or improving BBC feed processing performance by three orders of magnitude while at the same time reducing the number of machines required from over a dozen to one. More recently, he was a member of Apple’s Mac OS X performance group (an Apple-internal performance SWAT team) and improved on Cocoa XML performance by an order of magnitude. He is currently the Mac tech lead for the award-winning Livescribe Pulse Smartpen, and has his own software and consulting business specializing in high-performance PostScript and PDF software.