Concurrent Programming 2: Concurrent Programming with Objective-C

Concurrent Programming with Objective-C

Now that you understand some of the key issues regarding concurrent programming, you can begin to explore the mechanisms available to implement concurrent programming in Objective-C. This ranges from language features to APIs and system services, and includes the following:

• Language features: The Objective-C language includes several language features to support concurrent programming. The@synchronized directive is used to create locks in Objective-C code. Thread-safe access to Objective-C properties can be specified declaratively using the atomic property qualifier.
• Message passing: The Foundation Framework NSObject class includes several methods that deliver messages to other threads. These methods queue the messages on the run loop of the target thread and can be performed synchronously or asynchronously.
• Threads: The Foundation Framework provides a complete set of APIs for directly creating and managing threads. It also includes a set of Foundation Framework APIs for performing synchronized access to data shared by multiple threads.
• Operation queues: These are Objective-C based message-passing mechanisms that utilize an asynchronous design approach to perform concurrent programming.
• Dispatch queues: These are a C-based set of language features and runtime services used to perform tasks asynchronously and concurrently.