How do I use actors to protect shared mutable state?

In Swift, actors are a powerful concurrency feature designed to protect shared mutable state. By using actors, you can ensure that only one task accesses mutable state at a time, which helps prevent data races and inconsistencies.

To use actors, you define an actor type, which encapsulates the mutable state and provides methods that can be called by other parts of your code. The methods on the actor are asynchronous, meaning that they can be awaited, ensuring safe access to the state.

actor Counter { private var value: Int = 0 func increment() { value += 1 } func getValue() -> Int { return value } } let counter = Counter() Task { await counter.increment() let currentValue = await counter.getValue() print(currentValue) // Output: 1 }

actors Swift concurrency shared mutable state data races async programming