iOS offers several of ways to run tasks concurrently. This article is a short summary of them.

Grand Central Dispatch (GCD)

A queue based API that executes closures on workers pool of threads in a FIFO manner. GCD decides which thread is used (and not the developer).

Types of queues

  • Serial queue
    • Tasks are executed one at a time
  • Concurrent queue
    • Dequeued in a serial fashion
    • Execution happens concurrently

Important

  • Serial/Concurrent affects the destination queue to which you are dispatching.
  • Sync/Async affects the current thread from which you are dispatching.

NSThread / Thread

Manual thread creation using raw NSThread/Thread. This is not recommended for various reasons - responsibility to manage the threads with system conditions is on us with all its risks:

  • Improper management may cause memory leak in app
  • Deallocation once they have finished executing
  • Auto release pool will not manage threads created by us
  • Maintaining the order of execution

NSOperation / Operation

Under construction