Book Image

Mastering macOS Programming.

By : Stuart Grimshaw, Gregory Casamento
Book Image

Mastering macOS Programming.

By: Stuart Grimshaw, Gregory Casamento

Overview of this book

macOS continues to lead the way in desktop operating systems, with its tight integration across the Apple ecosystem of platforms and devices. With this book, you will get an in-depth knowledge of working on macOS, enabling you to unleash the full potential of the latest version using Swift 3 to build applications. This book will help you broaden your horizons by taking your programming skills to next level. The initial chapters will show you all about the environment that surrounds a developer at the start of a project. It introduces you to the new features that Swift 3 and Xcode 8 offers and also covers the common design patterns that you need to know for planning anything more than trivial projects. You will then learn the advanced Swift programming concepts, including memory management, generics, protocol orientated and functional programming and with this knowledge you will be able to tackle the next several chapters that deal with Apple’s own Cocoa frameworks. It also covers AppKit, Foundation, and Core Data in detail which is a part of the Cocoa umbrella framework. The rest of the book will cover the challenges posed by asynchronous programming, error handling, debugging, and many other areas that are an indispensable part of producing software in a professional environment. By the end of this book, you will be well acquainted with Swift, Cocoa, and AppKit, as well as a plethora of other essential tools, and you will be ready to tackle much more complex and advanced software projects.
Table of Contents (28 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Dedication
Preface
18
LLDB and the Command Line

Concurrency and asynchronicity


Concurrency and asynchronicity are not the same thing.

If you go back to the first two paragraphs of this chapter, you'll notice that we are talking about conceptually related but nevertheless separate topics:

  • One processor must be able to run several programs at the same time
  • One program must (or at least should) be able to run on more than one processor at the same time
  • A program may need to ask another process for assistance, and continue functioning while waiting for that help to arrive

The first point brings us to multithreading, and the second requires us to look at multiprocessing, both of which are aspects of concurrent programming.

The third point brings us to asynchronous programming.

Before we go any further, we will clear up what those terms mean.

Concurrency

When two processes run together, they are said to be running concurrently.

An example of this would be an app that monitors a user's input, say, typing, while at the same time downloading an update in...