30 Eki 2019

Grand Central Dispatch GCD Tutorial in Swift 5

Since they are both waiting for each other, hence the deadlock occurs. Concurrent queues allow multiple tasks to run at the same time. The queue guarantees tasks start in the order we add them.

2) ThreadB – Global thread which gets created when you submit some task. In general, I would use async and not sync all the time, unless sync is necessary – and always sync one thread with a different one, never with the same one. I watched this years WWDC GCD talk lately and I think there is a code snippet something is wrong with. It is about making a property thread-safe using DispatchQueues. Notice how Task 1, Task 2, and Task 3 start quickly one after the other. On the other hand, Task 1 took a while to start after Task 0.

In Benchmarking Swift Locking APIs I compare their performance. Concurrency is a hard problem to tackle, even if using GCD. I have composed a list of dos and don’ts which are here to address the most frequent GCD tasks in Swift. If you had to fall back so far to some helper class to get an easy to use closure based timer api, the wait is over.

Deep Dive Into Recursion in Swift

Custom concurrent queues always mapped into one of the global queues by specifying a Quality of Service property . In most of the cases if you want to run tasks in parallel it is recommended to use one of the global concurrent queues, you should only create custom serial queues. In all the previous examples we manually created the dispatch queues we used. However, it’s not always necessary to do that, especially if you don’t desire to change the properties of the dispatch queue. As I have already said in the beginning of this post, the system creates a collection of background dispatch queues, also named global queues. You can freely use them like you would do with custom queues, just keep in mind not to abuse the system by trying to use as many global queues as you can.

• And this pattern is something that we call thread explosion.
• However, as long as you initialise the queue as a concurrent one, then the parallel execution of the tasks will be respected, and all of them they’ll get their time to run.
• We’ll need that image view for a real world example later.
• The Dispatch framework (aka. GCD) is an amazing one, it has such a potential and it really takes some time to master it.
• In Swift 3, dispatch_once is deprecated and should be replaced with either global or static variables and constants.
• Threads- One is Main Thread and other background threads which system provides to us.

The important here is to make clear that our main queue is free to “work” while we have another task running on the background, and this didn’t happen on the synchronous execution of the queue. Once again, we see that the main queue has a high priority by default, and the queue1 dispatch queue is executed in parallel to the main one. The queue2 finishes last and doesn’t get many opportunities in execution while the tasks of the other two queues are being executed, as it has the lowest priority. This approach leads to great performance and low execution latency.

Asynchronous execution

The app won’t know about it when it’ll exit the method, we won’t be able to activate the queue, but most importantly we’ll get a crash on runtime. At its core, Grand Central Dispatch is a very efficient runtime for communication between threads and asynchronous execution. It is highly flexible and scales easily to lots of cores on the Mac as well as dual-core Apple Watch 4. It means performing task in Global Queue with using of background thread and when task finish, than global().sync use bring the work from globalQueue to mainQueue which update to UI.

On top of that, he’s added macOS programming to his repertoire over the last few years. To put the work in the pipeline, a task must be submitted to a queue. Beside not weakifying self in the first approach, both calls are equivalent. Dispatch queue simply allows you to perform iterations concurrently. Learn the principles of multi-threading with the GCD framework in Swift.

But before we go through all the specific topics of this post, let’s talk a bit about some specific concepts. First off, the dominating phrase in GCD is the dispatch queue. A queue is actually a block of code that can be executed synchronously or asynchronously, either on the main or on a background thread.

It helps to easier translate application logic into code, compared to the thread-based paradigm. With GCD, you can dispatch a task either synchronously or asynchronously. A GCD queue is not a thread, if you run multiple async operations on a concurrent queue your code can run on any available thread that fits the needs.

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However, as long as you initialise the queue as a concurrent one, then the parallel execution of the tasks will be respected, and all of them they’ll get their time to run. The only thing you need to provide is a unique label for the queue, and that’s all. The reverse DNS notation (“com.appcoda.myqueue”) works just fine as it’s easy to create unique labels, and it’s recommended even by Apple. However, it’s not mandatory, and you can use any string you’d like as long as the labels remain unique. But other than that, the above is not the only initialiser for a queue; you can provide more arguments upon initialisation that we’ll talk about in a while.

For example, you can download the data for an image on a secondary, background dispatch queue, but you’ll update the respective image view on the main thread. It’s quite often necessary to tell the system which tasks of your app are more important than others and which need priority in execution when working with the GCD and dispatch queues. Of course, tasks running on the main thread have always the highest priority, as the main queue also deals with the UI and keeps the app responsive. In any case, by providing that information to the system, iOS prioritises the queues properly and gives the needed resources according to what you’ll specify. Needless to say that all the tasks will eventually finish. However, the difference lies to which tasks will finish sooner, and which later.

Also, you can avoid using the now() method, but you have to provide a DispatchTime value as an argument on your own. What I showed above is the simplest way for delaying the execution of a work item in a queue, and actually you don’t need anything else further than that. Sometimes it’s required by the workflow of the app to delay the execution of a work item in a block. CGD allows you to do that by calling a special method and setting the amount of time after of which the defined task will be executed. That’s not good, because eventually the values inside of it are going to be messed up like hell if the array is not thread safe. For example multiple threads are trying to insert values to the array.

Concurrent tasks with DispatchGroups

There are exactly four of them organized by high, default, low priority plus an IO throttled background queue. In this post we are going to use small, specific examples for the GCD concepts that we’ll meet next. Normally, and given the fact that we’re not going to make a demo app, we could just use an Xcode Playground to work on, however this cannot be done with GCD.

Queues, tasks, groups everything you’ll ever need I promise. When you build the object and all the attributes you can pass. https://cryptominer.services/ And this pattern is something that we call thread explosion. That are blocked can cause more worker threads to spawn.

Concurrent queues don’t wait for one task to finish executing before starting the next. Both queues process work units in First-In-First-Out order. “x.sync means doing thing in main thread/UI thread and x.async means doing in background thread” Learn SASS SCSS tutorial — I don’t think that’s true, and you shouldn’t think of queues as threads (they’re not the same). Calling async means it doesn’t block, but you’re calling it on DispatchQueue.main, which is a queue guaranteed to run on the main thread.

The way GCD is used is brand new, totally Swift-like, and the new syntax makes it a lot easier for developers to get familiarised with it. These changes gave me the motivation to write a post about the most basic and important things one can do with GCD in Swift 3. If you were using GCD with its old coding style , then this whole new syntax will seem like a piece of cake; if not, then you’re just about to learn about a new programming chapter. Dispatch groups can be used in combination with work items and queues to create flexible runloops. DispatchGroup allows to aggregate multiple tasks and synchronize their behavior as a single unit. First of all, it’s good to know that Swift 3 has been finalized which spares me from adapting my sources with every new XCode Beta version.