The Swift Wish List
Christoffer Lernö has a good list of suggested changes, although I’m not sure I agree with the last one about optional dispatch.
Archive for August 25, 2014
FastCoding
FastCoder is a high-performance binary serialization format for Cocoa objects and object graphs. It is intended as a replacement for NSPropertyList, NSJSONSerializer, NSKeyedArchiver/Unarchiver and Core Data.
The design goals of the FastCoder library are to be fast, flexible and secure.
FastCoder is already faster (on average) for reading than any of the built-in serialization mechanisms in Cocoa, and is faster for writing than any mechanism except for JSON (which doesn’t support arbitrary object types). File size is smaller than NSKeyedArchiver, and comparable to the other methods.
This is potentially very useful because NSArchiver is essentially deprecated and NSKeyedArchiver is much slower and produces larger files. Binary property lists are decently fast but don’t support objects or references.
The API looks nice, except that I wish it used NSError rather than exceptions. It’s compatible with ARC, but he recommends compiling with -fno-objc-arc for better performance. This, despite lots of __unsafe_unretained annotations in the code.
Update (2014-09-03): Version 3 of FastCoding has a new file format that’s faster and smaller.
Building 3D With IKEA
Every year, CGSociety goes to SIGGRAPH, one of the premier conferences on innovation for the computer graphics and VFX industries in the world. In 2012, we watched as Martin Enthed, the IT Manager for the in-house communication agency of IKEA, gave a short presentation. He told us how their visualisation team had evolved from the use of traditional photography for the IKEA catalogue to a system today, where the bulk of its imagery is CG. I remember leaving the auditorium (which was packed) thinking, “Those natural-looking photographs in the IKEA catalogues are amazing. I can’t believe they’re mostly CG. It’s incredible.” It was such a great presentation that we went and saw it again in 2013 when it was an official talk, and figured you guys might like to know how IKEA did it - what they had to build and innovate to get their still images to look so real. So we made a time to catch up with Martin, and asked him how and why IKEA decided to make the leap from traditional to digital.
