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arraysmultithreadingswiftthread-safety
Duncan
Duncan

Reputation: 1213

Swift mutable array thread safety

Mutable arrays in Swift are not thread safe, so write access needs to be synchronized. Is it also the case that all reads need to be too? Specifically, are the following thread safe without the use of locks, serial queues etc. (assuming in both cases that other threads could be mutating the array):

  1. Accessing the count property of a mutable array
  2. Passing the array to a function, or assigning it to a variable (given that both of which will copy the array, since it's a struct)

Upvotes: 2

Views: 1713

Answers (1)

CouchDeveloper
CouchDeveloper

Reputation: 19116

The exact details about thread-safety should be specified by the language. Currently, there is no such specification for Swift. There's even no such thing like a "thread". Thus, we should apply the "worst case" (e.g. how C would behave) and apply those knowledge from GCD, and other C APIs that can be used in Swift.

Notice, that some language idioms may be thread-safe only because the language and the underlying toolset itself takes care of it, e.g. inserting calls to appropriate memory-barriers instructions when required for the language construct and the current hardware when it generates the code for it. The language C (and C++) does nothing in this respect on our behalf.

What we strive to avoid is a "data race". A data race can happen when any thread writes to a memory location and any other thread reads from the same location without using explicit synchronisation primitives. And, think of a "thread" as the same thing we mean when creating a NSThread object in Cocoa.

So, your question whether your scenario is thread-safe is a clear "No, it is not." What you need is some form of concurrency control, e.g. using a dedicated serial dispatch queue where you execute the access (reading and writing) to the array, or use locks in conjunction with a mutex (aka a "critical section").

Upvotes: 3

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