...where Apple beats three community-developed libraries. But maybe it just wasn't that hard to beat them.
I'm also skeptical because I don't see how Apple has any incentive to optimise code ever. Their devices (ARM & x86) are doubling in CPU power left and right while the UX basically stays the same. The second-to-last generation inevitably feels sluggish on the current OS version...which just happens to be the time when people usually buy their next Apple device. Why should they make their codebase harder to maintain in that environment?
>...where Apple beats three community-developed libraries.
That's just in one very restricted area (JSON parsing) where there are TONS of third-party libraries of varying quality for the exact same thing. Doesn't mean much in the big picture.
>I'm also skeptical because I don't see how Apple has any incentive to optimise code ever.
And yet, they use to do it all the time in OS X, replacing bad performing components with better ones. From 10.1 on, each release actually had better performance on the SAME hardware, until Snow Leopard at least. They had hit a plateau there I guess where all the low hanging fruit optimisations were already made.
Still, it makes sense to optimise severely, if not for anything else to boast better battery life.
And has there ever been an iOS update that has made things faster on the same hardware?
I don't think that Apple is intentionally making things slower, which is what I'm trying to say with the JSON parser (it is easy to write a wasteful implementation). But in the big picture, they're not optimising much either.
http://soff.es/updated-iphone-json-benchmarks
...where Apple beats three community-developed libraries. But maybe it just wasn't that hard to beat them.
I'm also skeptical because I don't see how Apple has any incentive to optimise code ever. Their devices (ARM & x86) are doubling in CPU power left and right while the UX basically stays the same. The second-to-last generation inevitably feels sluggish on the current OS version...which just happens to be the time when people usually buy their next Apple device. Why should they make their codebase harder to maintain in that environment?