async/await in SwiftUI

WWDC 2021 Videos

To learn more about the fundamental concepts of Swift concurrency, watch these videos first:

• Meet async/await in Swift: This session introduces try await, get async, unstructured task and continuations.
• Explore structured concurrency in Swift: This session covers concurrent and sequential binding, cancellation, task groups, unstructured and detached tasks. There’s a handy Flavors of task table near the end.
• Protect mutable state with Swift actors: This session covers data races, actor, protocol conformance in extensions with nonisolated declarations, detached tasks, Sendable, conformance and MainActor.

These sessions are SwiftUI-specific:

• Demystify SwiftUI: Get inspired to check all your SwiftUI code for inefficiencies. Lots of cute dog and cat photos.
• Discover concurrency in SwiftUI: This session provides valuable tips for using structured concurrency in a SwiftUI app (SpacePhoto).

These talks cover a few specific purposes:

• Meet AsyncSequence
• Use async/await with URLSession: This session covers guard let and throw, upload and download methods, cancellation, AsyncSequence and AuthenticationDelegate. Lots of cute dog images.
• Bring Core Data concurrency to Swift and SwiftUI

Set aside a good chunk of uninterrupted time for these deeper dives, or watch them in 10-15 minute chunks:

• Swift concurrency: Update a sample app: This session is solid gold! The presenter Ben Cohen is the Review Manager of the Swift Evolution proposal SE-0304 Structured Concurrency.
• Swift concurrency: Behind the scenes: This session goes in depth about thread explosion, the cooperative thread pool, continuations, async frames.

Melbourne Cocoaheads

And finally, two notable contributions from my colleagues at Melbourne Cocoaheads.

• How to test Swift async/await code with XCTest by Giovanni Lodi. This is a companion piece to his presentation (starts at 46:32).
• CombineAsyncually by Rob Amos. This is the companion repo for his presentation (right after Gio’s, at 1:17:27), where he demonstrates how you can bridge the new async/await functionality with Combine.

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial! Swift concurrency is a huge game-changer and it’s still evolving. There’s a lot to learn, so take some time now to explore it, even if you can’t really use it for a few years.

WWDC is like Christmas…

WWDC is like Christmas…

If you have any comments or questions, feel free to join in the forum discussion below!