Easiest way to find Square Root in Swift?

Question

I have been trying to figure out how to programmatically find a square root of a number in Swift. I am looking for the simplest possible way to accomplish with as little code ne

Answer 1

In Swift 3, the FloatingPoint protocol appears to have a squareRoot() method. Both Float and Double conform to the FloatingPoint protocol. So:

let x = 4.0
let y = x.squareRoot()

is about as simple as it gets.

The underlying generated code should be a single x86 machine instruction, no jumping to the address of a function and then returning because this translates to an LLVM built-in in the intermediate code. So, this should be faster than invoking the C library's sqrt function, which really is a function and not just a macro for assembly code.

In Swift 3, you do not need to import anything to make this work.