Swift concurrency back deployment Doug Gregor, a member of the Swift team at Apple, recently opened a PR that adds an option to build the Swift 5.5 Concurrency libraries for older versions of macOS/iOS. This PR generated a lot of interest amongst the Swift community, with people wondering if Swift's new concurrency model would soon be available for use in older OS versions. In this post to the Swift forums, Doug explains the changes contained in his PR. Posted on September 24, 2021 | concurrency swift-5-5
The difference between Thread.sleep() and Task.sleep() Swift 5.5 introduces tasks, which represent a unit of work that can be run asynchronously. In this post, Marin Todorov compares Thread.sleep() and Task.sleep(), using this comparison to help explain some of the benefits of Swift's new concurrency model. Posted on September 19, 2021 | concurrency swift-5-5
Add an option to build the concurrency library for back deployment Implemented by Doug Gregor, a member of the Swift team at Apple, this unexpected pull request adds an option to build the new Swift Concurrency libraries for older versions of macOS/iOS. These libraries can then be embedded in targets deployed before macOS 12/iOS 15 to support the new concurrency features. I'm still not sure if this makes the new concurrency features fully available when working with older OS versions, but this is something to watch. Posted on September 3, 2021 | concurrency evolution
My favorite new Swift API from iOS 15 In this post, Paul Hudson from Hacking With Swift shares his favorite new Swift API from iOS 15. This new API looks deceptively simple, but internally it's built on effectful read-only properties and AsyncSequence, both of which are powerful new language features. Posted on September 3, 2021 | concurrency ios15 wwdc21
Throwing and asynchronous Swift properties Computed properties that only define a get accessor are read-only. When they also have associated behavior, an effect, they are known as effectful read-only properties. In this post, John Sundell demonstrates how such properties can throw errors and perform asynchronous tasks. Posted on July 30, 2021 | concurrency swift-5-5
Bridge from Combine to AsyncSequence - the plan (p. 1) Despite only being released with iOS 13, it seems like Apple's Combine framework - used for handling asynchronous events - has been overshadowed by the new Swift concurrency model. In this post, Marin Todorov looks at both of these technologies, with the goal of bridging from a Combine Subscriber to an AsyncSequence. Posted on July 26, 2021 | combine concurrency
Swift actors tutorial - a beginner's guide to thread safe concurrency Swift 5.5's Actor type allows only one task at a time to access its mutable state, making it safe for use by concurrently executing tasks. Here, Tibor Bödecs from The Swift Dev teaches us how to use this new type to protect our applications from unwanted data-races and memory issues. Posted on July 25, 2021 | concurrency swift-5-5
Converting closure-based code into async/await in Swift Existing Swift APIs often provide asynchronous code execution using callback closures or delegate methods, which allow the caller to define what happens when the asynchronous task has finished. Swift's new concurrency model enables us to create similar asynchronous APIs using async/await and also provides methods for interfacing async/await with existing callback-based or delegate-based asynchronous APIs. In this post from his Modern Concurrency in Swift series, Andy Ibanez explains what continuations are and shows us how to use them to bridge from closure-based or delegate-based APIs to async/await. Posted on July 24, 2021 | concurrency swift-5-5
Cooperative Task Cancellation This post from Peter Friese from his SwiftUI Concurrency Essentials series focuses on the topic of cooperative task cancellation. Peter provides a SwiftUI example demonstrating why cancellation is important, and shows us how to use cooperative cancellation in our asynchronous code. Posted on July 24, 2021 | concurrency swift-5-5
How Swift runs an async executable The @main Swift attribute allows us to specify a particular type as the entry point for beginning program execution. Types marked with @main have a single implicit requirement: declaring a static main method. In this post, Ole Begemann provides some insight into how the Swift runtime executes an async program entry point with the help of the Swift compiler. Posted on July 24, 2021 | concurrency swift-5-5