Swift on Nvidia Jetson
The article details a project running Swift on an Nvidia Jetson Orin Nano to manage a vision pipeline using DeepStream, GStreamer, and TensorRT. Swift acts as a lightweight control plane, handling metadata processing, WebSocket communication, and pipeline management without moving pixel data. It outperformed Python in CPU and memory efficiency while maintaining stable long-term operation. The main challenges were container configuration for Jetson's video stack and building a proper Swift cross-compilation SDK with DeepStream headers.
- ▪Swift was used to build and manage a GStreamer-based vision pipeline on a Jetson Orin Nano, interfacing with DeepStream for object detection and tracking.
- ▪Swift processed typed metadata from DeepStream via a C shim, enabling efficient, low-overhead integration without handling raw video frames.
- ▪Compared to Python, the Swift host process used significantly less CPU (26.6% vs 52.1%) and memory (676 MB vs 797 MB) for the same pipeline.
- ▪Two key integration fixes were required: patching the CDI spec to expose Jetson video plugin paths and rebuilding the Swift SDK sysroot with DeepStream headers.
- ▪The system ran continuously for over 26 hours without memory leaks after switching from frame-level to metadata-only processing.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
In March 2026 I was invited to a virtual Swift meetup to talk about Swift running on edge/embedded devices. My experience at WendyLabs served me well for this challenge. That gave me the excuse to port a vision pipeline to Swift.The first version was a small Python project: object detection with YOLO26n, then selected frames sent to a quantized Qwen model for a description. The description stage was slow and not especially practical, but it proved the system could combine vision, detection metadata, and a local language model on the Jetson.I wanted to find out whether Swift could be a practical host language for a Jetson vision pipeline.Not “can Swift replace DeepStream?” That would be the wrong goal. The Jetson already has hardware video decode, TensorRT, GStreamer, and DeepStream.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Mihaichiorean.
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