iOS Interview Question: Synchronous Vs Asynchronous tasks in Swift

Nitin Aggarwal
Swiftable
Published in
4 min readApr 12, 2024

--

Explain the difference between synchronous and asynchronous tasks in Swift. When would you use each?

Synchronous and asynchronous tasks refer to different ways of executing code, each with its own characteristics and use cases.

It’s important to keep the main thread responsive, as a blocked main thread can lead to a poor user experience with an unresponsive or frozen app. Therefore, any tasks that might take some time should be performed asynchronously, allowing the main thread to continue handling user interactions and updating the user interface smoothly.

Synchronous Tasks:

In synchronous tasks, the program waits for a task to complete before moving on to the next line of code. The execution flow is blocked until the task finishes. Synchronous tasks are straightforward to reason about because they execute sequentially, one after the other.

You would typically use synchronous tasks for operations that are quick, non-blocking, and don’t involve any potentially time-consuming operations like network requests. Synchronous tasks are suitable for simple calculations, in-memory data manipulations, or other operations that can be completed quickly without…

--

--

Nitin Aggarwal
Swiftable

Lead iOS Engineer, Mentor, Author, Writer; 📙 Released "iOS Interview Handbook" 🔗 topmate.io/nitinagam17/827990