Synchronizing Concurrent Tasks in Swift with NSLock

Seal it off!

Photo by FLY:D on Unsplash

Difficulty: Beginner | Easy | Normal | Challenging

This article has been developed using Xcode 14.2, and Swift 5.7.2

Prerequisites:

• You will be expected to be aware of how to make a Single View Application
• Some knowledge of Data Races in programming would be useful

Keywords and Terminology:

NSLock: A synchronization method to control access to shared resources in multithreaded code.

NSLock

Introduction

In concurrent programming, tasks can access shared resources. This can lead to corruption or race conditions and associated unexpected behaviour. NSLock is one synchronization tool which can be used to ensure that only one task at a time can access a shared resource, preventing data races and other synchronization issues.

Using NSLock to synchronize access to shared resources, developers can write more robust and reliable code that performs well under various concurrent scenarios.

NSLock provides two methods for locking and unlocking the critical section: lock() and unlock(). When a thread calls the lock() method, it…