What is new in swift locks?

In Swift 6, several new features and improvements have been introduced to enhance the language's capabilities, particularly in the area of concurrency and synchronization. Here are the key updates related to Swift locks:

1. Data Race Safety: Swift 6 introduces a new language mode that provides data race safety guarantees, helping developers write correct concurrent programs. This mode is opt-in and can be adopted module by module (What’s new in Swift).

2. Low-Level Synchronization Primitives: The synchronization module in Swift 6 introduces new low-level primitives, including:

   • Atomics: These are generic over any type and provide an efficient, lock-free implementation on the platform. Atomic values should be stored in let properties for safe concurrent access, and all operations on atomics are explicit with memory ordering arguments (What’s new in Swift).
   • Mutex: Similar to atomics, a mutex should be stored in a let property and can be safely accessed concurrently. All accesses to the storage protected by the mutex are via the closure passed to the withLock method, ensuring mutually exclusive access (What’s new in Swift).

These updates are part of a broader effort to improve concurrency in Swift, making it easier to write safe and efficient concurrent code. For more details, you can refer to the session "What’s new in Swift" which covers these new low-level synchronization primitives.