[Cthulhu_]

Can you see any differences with different levels of optimization? I recall a presentation at some point where the old obj-C style compiled code did a lot of checks before and after calling a method ("does this object listen to this message?"), while with an optimization option enabled (whole module optimization?) these calls could be optimized out. That is, with Swift they can make the resulting machine code less er, "checking for safety", so to speak.

[saagarjha]

This was done at -O I believe (whatever the default is for "Profiling" in Xcode). This is anecdotal, but the fact that the code isn't littered with _swift_retain/_swift_release calls probably means that most of the standard reference-counting boilerplate has been optimized away.