tclementdev

libdispatch efficiency tips

The libdispatch is one of the most misused API due to the way it was presented to us when it was introduced and for many years after that, and due to the confusing documentation and API. This page is a compilation of important things to know if you're going to use this library. Many references are available at the end of this document pointing to comments from Apple's very own libdispatch maintainer (Pierre Habouzit).

My take-aways are:

• You should create very few, long-lived, well-defined queues. These queues should be seen as execution contexts in your program (gui, background work, ...) that benefit from executing in parallel. An important thing to note is that if these queues are all active at once, you will get as many threads running. In most apps, you probably do not need to create more than 3 or 4 queues.

• Go serial first, and as you find performance bottle necks, measure why, and if concurrency helps, apply with care, always validating under system pressure. Reuse

nicklockwood

Thoughts on Swift 2 Errors

When Swift was first announced, I was gratified to see that one of the (few) philosophies that it shared with Objective-C was that exceptions should not be used for control flow, only for highlighting fatal programming errors at development time.

So it came as a surprise to me when Swift 2 brought (What appeared to be) traditional exception handling to the language.

Similarly surprised were the functional Swift programmers, who had put their faith in the Haskell-style approach to error handling, where every function returns an enum (or monad, if you like) containing either a valid result or an error. This seemed like a natural fit for Swift, so why did Apple instead opt for a solution originally designed for clumsy imperative languages?

I'm going to cover three things in this post:

austinzheng

import Foundation

protocol SomeDelegateProtocol : class {
    func firstFunc() -> String
    func secondFunc() -> Bool
    func thirdFunc() -> Self
}

class MyClass {
    weak var delegate : SomeDelegateProtocol?

steipete

// Taken from the commercial iOS PDF framework http://pspdfkit.com.
// Copyright (c) 2014 Peter Steinberger, PSPDFKit GmbH. All rights reserved.
// Licensed under MIT (http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)
//
// You should only use this in debug builds. It doesn't use private API, but I wouldn't ship it.

// PLEASE DUPE rdar://27192338 (https://openradar.appspot.com/27192338) if you would like to see this in UIKit.

#import <objc/runtime.h>
#import <objc/message.h>