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rebeloper edited this page Jul 12, 2026 · 2 revisions

This tutorial walks through Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) in a carefully structured progression:

🥚 Foundations

  1. 01 — Why GCD Exists
  2. 02 — Thread vs Queue
  3. 03 — Queue
  4. 04 — Sync vs Async
  5. 05 — Main Queue and Global Queues

🧑‍🍽️ Core Concepts

  1. 06 — Quality of Service
  2. 07 — DispatchWorkItem
  3. 08 — Deadlocks
  4. 09 — Delaying Work

⚡ Coordination

  1. 10 — DispatchGroup
  2. 11 — DispatchSemaphore
  3. 12 — Barriers
  4. 13 — Target Queues

🔒 Safety & Data Flow

  1. 14 — Data Races and Thread Safety
  2. 15 — Locks
  3. 16 — The Thread Explosion Problem

🧠 Advanced Control

  1. 17 — concurrentPerform
  2. 18 — DispatchSource
  3. 19 — Cancellation in GCD

🌊 Real-World Patterns

  1. 20 — Callback Chains and Callback Hell
  2. 21 — Common GCD Gotchas

🎓 Wrap-up

  1. 22 — How Everything Fits Together
  2. 23 — From GCD to Swift Concurrency

By following this path, you'll go from:

👉 "GCD is a pile of confusing APIs 😵" to 👉 "I understand the mechanics async/await is built on 💡"

This is a companion series to SwiftConcurrencyExplained — read this one first for the low-level foundation, then that one for the modern high-level model.

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