WWDC 2021

Preventing data races with Swift’s Actors

Published on: June 14, 2021

We all know that async / await was one of this year’s big announcements WWDC. It completely changes the way we interact with concurrent code. Instead of using completion handlers, we can await results in a non-blocking way. More importantly, with the new Swift Concurrency features, our Swift code is much safer and consistent than ever before. For example, the Swift team built an all-new threading model that ensures your program doesn’t spawn more threads than there are CPU cores to avoid thread explosion. This is a huge difference from GCD where every call to async would spawn a new...

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Thoughts on Combine in an async/await world

Published on: June 8, 2021

When Apple announced their own Functional Reactive Programming framework at WWDC 2019 I was super excited. Finally, a simplified, easy to use framework that we could use to dip our toes in FRP. What made it even better is that SwiftUI makes heavy use of Combine, which means that Apple had to buy in to the technology themselves. This made it seem unlikely that Apple would abandon the technology any time soon. Then WWDC 2020 came around and there weren’t any meaningful changes to Combine. It was hardly even mentioned in the sessions. To me, this was a signal that...

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