What are actors?

Generated on 8/1/2024

2 searches

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.

A Swift Tour: Explore Swift’s features and design

A Swift Tour: Explore Swift’s features and design

Learn the essential features and design philosophy of the Swift programming language. We’ll explore how to model data, handle errors, use protocols, write concurrent code, and more while building up a Swift package that has a library, an HTTP server, and a command line client. Whether you’re just beginning your Swift journey or have been with us from the start, this talk will help you get the most out of the language.

Migrate your app to Swift 6

Migrate your app to Swift 6

Experience Swift 6 migration in action as we update an existing sample app. Learn how to migrate incrementally, module by module, and how the compiler helps you identify code that’s at risk of data races. Discover different techniques for ensuring clear isolation boundaries and eliminating concurrent access to shared mutable state.

Design interactive experiences for visionOS

Design interactive experiences for visionOS

Learn how you can design a compelling interactive narrative experience for Apple Vision Pro from the designers of Encounter Dinosaurs. Discover how these types of experiences differ from existing apps, media, and games, and explore how to design narratives that bring audiences into new worlds. Find out how you can create stories that adapt to any space and size, provide multiple levels of interaction to make them accessible to all, and use animation, spatial audio, and custom gestures to further immerse people in your experience.

Compose interactive 3D content in Reality Composer Pro

Compose interactive 3D content in Reality Composer Pro

Discover how the Timeline view in Reality Composer Pro can bring your 3D content to life. Learn how to create an animated story in which characters and objects interact with each other and the world around them using inverse kinematics, blend shapes, and skeletal poses. We’ll also show you how to use built-in and custom actions, sequence your actions, apply triggers, and implement natural movements.