Book Image

Swift Cookbook. - Second Edition

By : Keith Moon, Chris Barker
Book Image

Swift Cookbook. - Second Edition

By: Keith Moon, Chris Barker

Overview of this book

Swift is an exciting, multi-platform, general-purpose programming language, and with this book, you'll explore the features of its latest version, Swift 5.3. The book begins with an introduction to the basic building blocks of Swift 5.3, its syntax, and the functionalities of Swift constructs. You’ll then discover how Swift Playgrounds provide an ideal platform to write, execute, and debug your Swift code. As you advance through the chapters, the book will show you how to bundle variables into tuples or sets, order your data with an array, store key-value pairs with dictionaries, and use property observers. You’ll also get to grips with the decision-making and control structures in Swift, examine advanced features such as generics and operators, and explore functionalities outside of the standard library. Once you’ve learned how to build iOS applications using UIKit, you'll find out how to use Swift for server-side programming, run Swift on Linux, and investigate Vapor. Finally, you'll discover some of the newest features of Swift 5.3 using SwiftUI and Combine to build adaptive and reactive applications, and find out how to use Swift to build and integrate machine learning models along with Apple’s Vision Framework. By the end of this Swift book, you'll have discovered solutions to boost your productivity while developing code using Swift 5.3.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
12
About Packt

Using Dispatch queues for concurrency

We live in a multicore computing world. Multicore processors are found in everything, from our laptops and mobile phones to our watches. With these multiple cores comes the ability to work in parallel. These concurrent streams of work are known as threads, and programming in a multithreaded way enables your code to make the best use of the processor's cores. Deciding how and when to create new threads and manage the available resources are complex tasks, so Apple has built a framework to do the hard work for us. It is called Grand Central Dispatch.

Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) handles the thread maintenance and monitors the available resources while providing a simple, queue-based interface for getting concurrent work done. With the open-sourcing of Swift, Apple also open-sourced GCD in the form of libdispatch, since Swift does not yet have built-in concurrency features.

In this recipe, we will explore some of the features of libdispatch, also...