I'm looking for a way to do frame-by-frame programmatically drawn animations in a MacOs application (not keyframe property animation). I have tried drawing to CALayers using the drawLayer:inContext: delegate method, calling setNeedsDisplay to draw each frame, however I'm getting poor performance doing it this way. Is there a recommended way to do this type of animation in Cocoa?
A good way to do entirely custom animations is by using CADisplayLink (iOS) or CVDisplayLink (macOS). CVDisplayLink is basically a timer that fires as often as the display refreshes.
You can then calculate your own timing functions based on the values you get off CVDisplayLink. The API is still C so it is a bit cumbersome to use, especially in Swift, but once you get how it functions it works like a charm.
I have only had good experiences with CVDisplayLink, especially with layers. They are really performant. I was able to animate 1000+ layers CVDisplayLink driven at 60fps without any problems.
If you need any help in using the API, feel free to ask!
Alternative:
If you want to use a more modern API, I can recommend SpriteKit. There are some nice animation APIs as well. And they perform really good. Apple uses it itself to draw more complex views (like the Memory Debugger in Xcode).