A brief introduction to concurrency

Concurrency in the context of iOS development with Swift is about managing multiple tasks that an application might need to perform simultaneously, such as fetching data from the internet, while keeping the user interface responsive by avoiding blocking the main thread, which is responsible for UI updates.

In this chapter, we will focus on the most recent approaches.

Parallelism, while related to concurrency, is specifically about executing multiple tasks at exactly the same time, particularly on devices with multi-core processors, and this includes all modern mobile devices and computers in general. iOS devices leverage parallelism to perform complex computations or handle multiple operations at once, enhancing performance. Swift and iOS provide several mechanisms to facilitate the parallel execution of tasks.

Race conditions in Swift development become a concern when multiple tasks try to access or modify the same piece of data concurrently...