Book Image

Mastering Swift 5.3 - Sixth Edition

By : Jon Hoffman
Book Image

Mastering Swift 5.3 - Sixth Edition

By: Jon Hoffman

Overview of this book

Over the years, Mastering Swift has proven itself among developers as a popular choice for an in-depth and practical guide to the Swift programming language. This sixth edition comes with the latest features, an overall revision to align with Swift 5.3, and two new chapters on building swift from source and advanced operators. From the basics of the language to popular features such as concurrency, generics, and memory management, this in-depth guide will help you develop your expertise and mastery of the language. As you progress, you will gain practical insights into some of the most sophisticated elements in Swift development, including protocol extensions, error handling, and closures. The book will also show you how to use and apply them in your own projects. In later chapters, you will understand how to use the power of protocol-oriented programming to write flexible and easier-to-manage code in Swift. Finally, you will learn how to add the copy-on-write feature to your custom value types, along with understanding how to avoid memory management issues caused by strong reference cycles. By the end of this Swift book, you will have mastered the Swift 5.3 language and developed the skills you need to effectively use its features to build robust applications.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
21
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22
Index

Concurrency and Parallelism in Swift

When I first started learning Objective-C, I already had a good understanding of concurrency and multitasking with my background in other languages, such as C and Java. This background made it very easy for me to create multithreaded applications using threads. Then, Apple changed everything when they released Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) with OS X 10.6 and iOS 4. At first, I went into denial; there was no way GCD could manage my application's threads better than I could. Then, I entered the anger phase; GCD was hard to use and understand. Next was the bargaining phase; maybe I could use GCD with my threading code, so I could still control how the threading worked. Then, there was the depression phase; maybe GCD does handle threading better than I could. Finally, I entered the wow phase; this GCD thing is really easy to use and works amazingly well.

After using GCD and operation queues with Objective-C, I do not see a reason for using...