Tasks are versatile and adapt to many use cases. The most intriguing one to me is using them as futures: starting a Task with asynchronous work and using its handle anywhere the result is needed. Because tasks are inherently thread-safe, they don’t require additional protection or synchronization. This enables
If you’ve been developing for Apple platforms for a while, your understanding of “concurrency” may have its origins in the era of Grand Central Dispatch. Or, if like me, you’ve been here a bit longer, maybe even pthreads. 🙈 Threads are mostly gone from modern Swift, but you can
In the first post on task cancellation, I showcased a few simple examples of manual cancellation handling using Task.isCancelled and Task.checkCancellation. Using these functions is passive (or reactive) cancellation support: If your code happens to pass over such a check, it cancels. But if not, there might be
Working with cancellation in tasks is a double-edged sword. It’s great when it works, but it’s so easy to shoot yourself in the foot. Take the observerTask example from the previous post: let observerTask = Task { let notifications = NotificationCenter.default.notifications(named: name) for await next in notifications { print(
I’ve been diving deeper into Swift’s structured concurrency (and strict Sendability conformance) lately, and I’ve learned quite a lot. I’m writing this down to deepen my understanding—and I hope others might find it useful as well. This is the first of a few posts revolving
When working with images, we rarely need to show them at full size — most often ist’s rather as a thumbnail or preview. Using fully loaded images for this is quite slow, so we implemented a thumbnail cache. While modernizing this component, I remembered user reports about slow image loading.
I’ve been running a software company for over 22 years now, and always managed to go without a personal blog. We’ve had company blogs on and off over the years, where I wrote a thing or two, but they all faced challenges. Too little time, too many distractions,