actor

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 makes actors particularly useful for avoiding data races in concurrent programming.

Here are some key points about actors from the sessions:

1. Automatic State Protection: Actors serialize accesses to their state, which means that only one task can interact with the actor's state at a time. This helps prevent data races and ensures thread safety.
2. Asynchronous Access: Calls to actor methods from outside the actor's context are asynchronous. This means you need to use the await keyword when accessing actor methods from different concurrency domains.
3. Main Actor: In some cases, you might need to ensure that certain code runs on the main actor, especially when dealing with UI updates. Swift provides mechanisms like @MainActor and assume isolated to help with this.

For more detailed information, you can refer to the following sessions and chapters:

• A Swift Tour: Explore Swift’s features and design (Concurrency chapter)
• Migrate your app to Swift 6 (Delegate callbacks and concurrency chapter)

These sessions provide a comprehensive overview of how actors work in Swift and how to use them effectively in your code.