If you've been following along with Swift Concurrency in the past few weeks, you might have come across the term "task local values". Task local values are, like the name suggests, values that are scoped to a certain task. These values are only available within the context they're scoped to, and they are really only supposed to be used in a handful of use cases. In this post, I will explain what task local are, and more importantly I will explain how and when they are useful. For a full rundown of task local values and their design I'd like...

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...

Data races make concurrency hard. They occur when two threads access the same data and at least one of them is a write. It’s trivial to write a data race, but it’s really hard to debug. Data races aren’t always clear, aren’t always reproducible, and might not always manifest in the same way. Shared mutable state is needed for a data race to occur. Value types don’t suffer from data races due to the way they work; they’re copied. When you pass an array around, copies are created. This is due to array’s value semantics. Even an object that’s a...