What are actors?
Asked on 08/01/2024
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Actors in Swift are a feature designed to help manage concurrency by protecting shared mutable state. They are similar to classes in that they are reference types, but they automatically serialize access to their state, ensuring that only one task can execute at a time on an actor. This serialization helps prevent data races and makes concurrent programming safer and more manageable.
When you call methods on an actor from outside its context, those calls are asynchronous. This means you need to use the await keyword to handle these calls properly. By using actors, you can ensure that accesses to shared state are synchronized, which helps eliminate concurrency-related errors.
For more details, you can refer to the session A Swift Tour: Explore Swift’s features and design at the timestamp 21:38.
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