Swift Actors: Manage Concurrency and Prevent Data Races
The conceptual model
Let’s take a look at Actors in Swift. They’re rather great, as they can help to solve data races.
Difficulty: Beginner | Easy | Normal | Challenging
This article has been developed using Xcode 14.2, and Swift 5.7.2
Prerequisites
It would be useful to have some idea about Actors in programming
Keywords and Terminology
actor: A role played by the user with respect to interacting with the system
Actors
Actors are a conceptual model used to deal with concurrency
They are similar to classes in OO languages. In swift they are also reference types, which means when we create Actors with the actor keyword which means a reference to the object is passed when the actor is assigned.
An actor is a conceptual model which has been imported into swift. In programming we use actors to deal with concurrency in the model computation world.
In Swift actor types have private state (cannot be modified by another actor) which means their state is protected from data races which can occur from concurrent access to mutable data.
