Modern Swift Concurrency Summary, Cheatsheet, and Thanks
Since WWDC21, we have talked, extensively, about all the new concurrency features introduced in Swift 5.5. We covered a lot of topics, so I decided to finish off this series writing a summary article were we cover the most important topics of each article. Links will be given to the relevant articles when necessary in case this summary is not enough.
Along the new concurrency APIs introduced in Swift at WWDC2021, we have AsyncSequence. AsyncSequence is a collection protocol that allow us to receive data in loops and even top higher order functions - such as filter, map and reduce - asynchronously, being able to await for new data as it becomes available.
We have recently talked about actors, what they are, and how to use them. If you remember, an actor controls access to its properties, so a member doesn’t get written from different processes at the same time, avoiding corrupted data.
When we are working with concurrency, the most common problem developers face are data races. Whether it is a task updating a value at the same time another task is reading it or two tasks writing a value so that it it has an invalid value, data races are probably the main pain point of concurrency. Data races are very easy create, and hard to debug. There are entire books dedicated to the problem of data races and established patterns to avoid them.
This article was originally written creating examples using Xcode 13 beta 1. The article, code samples, and provided sample project have been updated for Xcode 13 beta 3.
Understanding async tasks is a requirement to read this article. If you don’t understand async tasks, you can read the Introduction to Unstructured Concurrency in Swift article from this Article Series
This article was originally written creating examples using Xcode 13 beta 1. The article, code samples, and provided sample project have been updated for Xcode 13 beta 3.
This article was originally written creating examples using Xcode 13 beta 1. The article, code samples, and provided sample project have been updated for Xcode 13 beta 3.
This article was originally written creating examples using Xcode 13 beta 1. The article, code samples, and provided sample project have been updated for Xcode 13 beta 3.
Understanding async/await is a pre-requisite to read this article. If you aren’t familiar with that concept, feel free to read the first part of this article series: Understanding async/await in Swift.
This article was originally written creating examples using Xcode 13 beta 1. The article, code samples, and provided sample project have been updated for Xcode 13 beta 3.
To better benefit from this article, you should be familiar with async/await. If you aren’t, feel free to read the first part of this article series: Understanding async/await in Swift.
