Designing Multi-Threaded Applications Using Swift

Being an iOS Developer in the automotive industry, I spend a great deal of time working with real time data. The need to process continuous streams of data efficiently is something that is important in many applications today. To make sure you don’t lock up the user interface, you will most likely need to use multi-threading.

Information that is streamed in real time is the most fun to work with, because you will constantly receive new data that you can use to update your visuals. It is also the most difficult and the most frustrating thing you can do, because an iOS device has certain limitations when it comes to hardware. Luckily, Apple has made multi-threading available through an extremely easy-to-use interface called GCD (Grand Central Dispatch). You may be familiar with code that looks a little something like this:

The main queue is where most of your programs code is run if you don’t explicitly place it in another queue. It’s a serial queue, meaning that it will pick the first item in line, execute the code, wait for it to finish, and release the item, then pick the…