What is the best practices and modern solution to work with ASYNCHRONOUS, CONCURRENCY and PARALLELISM in Swift language

Asked on 09/24/2024

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To work with asynchronous, concurrency, and parallelism in Swift, the modern solution involves using Swift's concurrency model, which includes features like async/await, actors, and tasks. Here are some best practices and modern solutions:

  1. Async/Await: This syntax is used to handle asynchronous operations. Functions that can suspend are marked with the async keyword, and the await keyword is used to indicate where a suspension can occur. This makes the code easier to read and maintain compared to traditional callback-based approaches.

  2. Actors: Actors are used to protect mutable state and ensure data isolation. They help prevent data races by ensuring that only one task can access the actor's state at a time. This is particularly useful for managing shared mutable state safely.

  3. Tasks: The fundamental unit of concurrency in Swift is a task, which represents an independent concurrent execution context. Tasks are lightweight and can be created in large numbers. They can execute concurrently, making them suitable for handling multiple operations simultaneously.

  4. Data Race Safety: Swift 6 introduces data race safety by default, turning potential data race issues into compile-time errors. This significantly improves the security and reliability of your applications.

  5. Low-Level Synchronization Primitives: Swift also provides low-level primitives like atomics and mutexes for synchronization. These are useful for scenarios where you need fine-grained control over concurrency.

For more detailed information, you can refer to the sessions from WWDC 2024:

These sessions provide a comprehensive overview of the concurrency features in Swift and how to effectively use them in your applications.