[solidsnack9000]

> Because concurrency is supported through an Apple API rather than being explicit in the language’s design, using it is currently very much coupled to iOS or macOS development.

I am not sure this is accurate, because libdispatch has been ported to Linux:

https://github.com/apple/swift-corelibs-libdispatch

They are "...early in the development of this project..." but server-side frameworks use it.

[jakerockland]

This is one of the things I have marked as an issue to elaborate a bit more on.

https://github.com/jakerockland/go-vs-swift/issues/8

Thanks for the link! :)

[solidsnack9000]

The two differences that I wonder about:

* What is the cost profile of Dispatch relative to the Go scheduler? It seems that Go programs suffer a slow down just to enable multi-threading, for example -- which is not unlike other systems (GHC at some time in the past) that have a similar model.

* Is Dispatch suitable for "millions of threads" ala Erlang? Hundreds of thousands of threads? Dispatch allows you to decide which queue to put things on; but also kind of requires it of you.

[eridius]

AIUI Dispatch is suitable for potentially hundreds of thousands of queues. It doesn't spin up thousands of actual OS threads, instead it intelligently manages a pool of OS threads and multiplexes the queues onto them. IIRC each dispatch queue is around 100-200 bytes in size (while empty).

[solidsnack9000]

Yeah but I wonder about is, is the concurrency truly fine-grained and scalable? For example, you want to do a map over an array of 1 million elements. Can you dump a million blocks on a queue for a linear speed-up?

[eridius]

You could dump a million blocks in the queue, but that's probably too fine-grained. Each block is an allocation and there's some amount of overhead to executing blocks (though I've never measured how much). So unless each element actually takes a long time to process, you probably want to batch it up into larger segments. Dispatch has an API explicitly meant for this scenario (doing concurrent work over an array of elements), which is dispatch_apply() in C or DispatchQueue.concurrentPerform(iterations:execute:) in Swift, though the block is just given an index and it has to do the legwork of reading the correct elements from the input.