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Working With Actors and Concurrency in Swift 5.5

Mark Lucking
Better Programming
Published in
6 min readDec 13, 2021

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It has been just over a year since Apple surprised many people when they announced the M1 chip. Although at the time the majority of seasoned technologists I am sure took the claims of performance improvements with a pinch of salt — after all — most hardware manufacturers make the same claims every year.

But another well in kept secret emerged this summer at the WWDC2021. During that event, they quietly launched some game-changing modifications to the swift language. Changes that exploit the synergies between the hardware and software groups @ Apple; to make the most of those new M1 chips.

The secrets revealed a new concurrency model & language features within Swift 5.5. A model that is intended to a lot more than just replace the current constructs for managing concurrency in swift, namely GCD. Changes that introduce the ability to do concurrent coding across significant sways of the language, the tech details behind which you find here. Join me in this article to find out more —

Concurrent coding a hard, it is difficult because it has a vocabulary all of its own and can be a real challenge. You have cores, which is a reference to the CPUs on a chip and you have threads that run on those cores.

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Mark Lucking
Mark Lucking

Written by Mark Lucking

Coding for 35+ years, enjoying using and learning Swift/iOS development. Writer @ Better Programming, @The StartUp, @Mac O’Clock, Level Up Coding & More

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With the Async/Await/Actor/Tasks ideology and methodology, I am in PROGRAMMING, heaven!
Nice right up...
I love how Apple is saying "LOOK guys, due to the 'physical limits' of CPU/GPU GHz all we can kinda 'only' do, but REALLY can do is add more…

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