modern concurrency

Modern concurrency in Swift, particularly with the introduction of Swift 6, focuses on enhancing data race safety and simplifying concurrent programming. Swift 6 achieves data race safety by default, turning potential data race issues into compile-time errors, which significantly improves app security and reduces debugging time. This is a major advancement from Swift 5.10, which required enabling complete concurrency checking to achieve similar safety.

Swift concurrency is built around mechanisms like data isolation, actors for protecting mutable state, and the Sendable protocol for safe data sharing. These features help manage concurrency more effectively by ensuring that mutable state is accessed safely across different threads.

In the session What’s new in Swift, Swift 6's language mode and data-race safety are discussed, highlighting the improvements in concurrency checking and the introduction of low-level synchronization primitives like atomics and mutexes. These tools provide developers with the necessary infrastructure to ensure data race safety in their applications.

Additionally, the session Migrate your app to Swift 6 covers practical aspects of adopting Swift 6's concurrency features, including enabling complete concurrency checking and handling shared mutable state. This session provides a hands-on approach to migrating apps to Swift 6, ensuring that concurrency is managed safely and efficiently.

For a deeper dive into writing concurrent code in Swift, the session A Swift Tour: Explore Swift’s features and design covers the basics of tasks, async/await, and actors, providing a solid foundation for understanding and implementing modern concurrency in Swift.