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Introduction
So, now that we are intimately familiar with what concurrency tools Apple has provided to us in the past and present, let’s look at what the future of concurrency looks like in Swift.
As we all know, Swift 5.5 was released 9 months ago with a variety of tools for concurrency. These tools are in many ways simpler and more robust than the tools we just covered, and they solve a lot of the problems we encountered. Best of all, the tools provide a fully integrated solution to data race conditions, and it’s really amazing to see. Once these features are fully baked in the language you will seldom have to think of asynchrony in terms of threads or reactive streams, and instead you will be able to write code that largely looks the same as if you were working entirely with synchronous processes.
So, let’s repeat the program we have put forth when exploring threads, operation queues and dispatch queues, but this time with a focus on Swift’s modern concurrency tools. These tools are quite a bit different from the threads and queues we previously explored because they are deeply integrated with the language itself, and not just a library built with the language.
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References
NSOperation
Mattt • Monday Jul 14, 2014In life, there’s always work to be done. Every day brings with it a steady stream of tasks and chores to fill the working hours of our existence. Productivity is, as in life as it is in programming, a matter of scheduling and prioritizing and multi-tasking work in order to keep up appearances.
libdispatch efficiency tips
Thomas Clement • Thursday Apr 26, 2018The libdispatch is one of the most misused API due to the way it was presented to us when it was introduced and for many years after that, and due to the confusing documentation and API. This page is a compilation of important things to know if you’re going to use this library. Many references are available at the end of this document pointing to comments from Apple’s very own libdispatch maintainer (Pierre Habouzit).
Modernizing Grand Central Dispatch Usage
Apple • Monday Jun 5, 2017macOS 10.13 and iOS 11 have reinvented how Grand Central Dispatch and the Darwin kernel collaborate, enabling your applications to run concurrent workloads more efficiently. Learn how to modernize your code to take advantage of these improvements and make optimal use of hardware resources.
What went wrong with the libdispatch. A tale of caution for the future of concurrency.
Thomas Clement • Monday Nov 23, 2020Introducing Swift Atomics
Karoy Lorentey • Thursday Oct 1, 2020I’m delighted to announce Swift Atomics, a new open source package that enables direct use of low-level atomic operations in Swift code. The goal of this library is to enable intrepid systems programmers to start building synchronization constructs (such as concurrent data structures) directly in Swift.
