Replacing Auto Layout With LayoutKit
Nick Snyder (via Dave Verwer):
Here’s an example of a layout in the LinkedIn app. It has two labels: there’s a multi-line label on the left, and a single line label on the right. For the right label, we just want it to be as big as it needs to be to display the content. Think of it as a badge with a number. Then the left label just has some arbitrary amount of text that we want to wrap to up to two lines.
To accomplish this using Auto Layout, on the right label we give it required content hugging and required content compression resistance, so that it’s exactly the width that it needs to be. This worked fine in iOS 8, and it worked fine with all the sample data that we tested this layout with during development. But when iOS 9 launched, this caused a huge performance problem for some of our users that we didn’t know about until they started complaining.
[…]
We have Auto Layout as our baseline, 1x. You can see that if you use
UIStackView, it’s actually slower than Auto Layout because it’s built on top of Auto Layout. On the right, we have manual layout. Manual layout is 9.4 times faster than Auto Layout. On the green we have LayoutKit, and LayoutKit is about 7.7 times faster than Auto Layout. Not as fast as doing manual layout, but you get a lot of nice things without having to write a lot of code.
