№0027/10insightful
Swift actor reentrancy breaks single-writer invariants
context
Designing Swift concurrency code with actors to serialize access to mutable state.
thoughts
Swift actors serialize method entry — only one method runs at a time. That mental model quietly breaks at every await: when an actor method suspends, OTHER methods on the SAME actor can run in the gap. So func update() { let x = read(); await net(); write(x) } can be interleaved with a second update() call in the network gap, and the write(x) runs with a stale view of state. Fix: move reads/writes into sync helpers and hold the awaited value in a local, OR version-check after resuming.
next time
Any actor method containing an await has a reentrancy window. Never assume invariants across that await. Extract synchronous read/write helpers, or version-check after resuming.
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