[mbjdesign]

I spent a bit of time watching the sessions after this years WWDC. I’m primarily an Elixir developer but have wanted to try Swift for a while, so the introduction of Actors felt like a good point to jump in.

My enduring impression after learning Swift Actors is that a LOT of additional complexity is introduced because of reference types. The data inside an Elixir process is just that: data, but the possibility of the data in a Swift Actor being a reference to a class suddenly makes everything complicated.

Regardless of the technical achievement from a compiler perspective I found that Swift’s Actors didn’t map well to my understanding of them from Elixir/Erlang and that they weren’t a net positive for solving the kinds of problems actors are suited for. I’ll concede this is all very personal and subjective though.

[zionic]

My understanding is the primary role of Swift actors is to support safe global state in an async environment.

I plan to use actors enums for states in my next major app version release.

Or at least I was, until Apple decided to backdoor the iPhone in the absurd notion that it protects kids. Now I’m trying to figure out how to migrate off their platform entirely.