When should I use an actor?
Asked on 03/31/2025
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Actors in Swift are used to encapsulate shared mutable state and automatically protect it by serializing accesses. This means that only a single task is allowed to execute at a time on an actor, and calls to actor methods from outside the context of the actor are asynchronous. This makes actors particularly useful when you need to ensure data-race safety in concurrent programming. For example, if you have a global variable that is accessed from different concurrency domains, making it an actor can help synchronize accesses and eliminate concurrency-related errors.
Actors are similar to classes in that they are reference types, but they provide the added benefit of managing concurrency for you. This is especially useful in scenarios where you might otherwise have to manually add synchronization to ensure thread safety.
For more details, you can refer to the session A Swift Tour: Explore Swift’s features and design (21:38) where actors are discussed in the context of Swift's concurrency model.
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