Swift Queues/Concurrency and Locking

Question

I usually use serial queues as a mechanism of locking to make sure that one resource can be accessed by many different threads without having problems. But, I have seen cases where other devs use concurrent queues with or even without semaphores (saw IBM/Swift on Linux using concurrent queue with semaphore).

Are there any advantages/disadvantages? I would believe that just using serial queues would correctly block the resource without wasting time for semaphores.

On the other hand, what happens when the cpu is busy? If I remember correctly, a serial queue is not necessarily executed on the same thread/same cpu, right?

That would be the only explanation I can think of; a concurrent queue would be able to share the workload on all available threads/cpus, assuring thread-safe access through the semaphore. Using a concurrent queue without a semaphore would not be safe, right?

Answer 1

Concurrent queues with semaphores give you more granularity as to what conditions require locking. You can have most of the functions be executed in parallel, with only the mutually exclusive regions (the critical regions) requiring locking.

However, this can be equally simulated with a concurrent queue whose critical regions are dispatched to a serial queue, to ensure mutual exclusion.

I would believe that just using serial queues would correctly block the resource without wasting time for semaphores.

Serial queues also need semaphores as mutation to the queue must be synchronized. However, it tucks it under the rug, and protects you from the many easy-to-make mistakes associated with manual semaphore use.

Using a concurrent queue without a semaphore would not be safe, right?

Nope