An iOS Developer Blog

Leverage the power of Continuations when converting callbacks or delegate based APIs

The new async/await Swift concurrency API released together with Swift 5.5 was finally unveiled during the WWDC 21 last June. This new architecture fulfilled all the expectations that we iOS developers had, who were eagerly waiting for this since the Swift first release in 2014, and whose hopes got boosted in 2017 with the Swift Concurrency Manifesto by Chris Lattner himself.

From all the new APIs and tools that were introduced, the new async/await syntax, Actors, and Tasks attracted most of the attention from the Swift community. And rightly so, these new additions improved considerably the readability of asynchronous code and the easiness when ensuring thread safety in our apps.

However, there was another mechanism introduced then that didn’t capture so much consideration even though they are very powerful when working together with async/await: Continuations.