Grand Central Dispatch (GCD)

Prior to Swift 3, using GCD felt like writing low-level C code. The API was a little cumbersome and sometimes hard to understand because it did not use any of the Swift language design features. This all changed with Swift 3 because Apple took up the task of rewriting the API so it would meet the Swift 3 API guidelines.

GCD provides what is known as dispatch queues to manage submitted tasks. The queues manage these submitted tasks and execute them in a First-In, First-Out (FIFO) order. This ensures that the tasks are started in the order they were submitted.

A task is simply some work that our application needs to perform. For example, we can create tasks that perform simple calculations, read/write data to disk, make an HTTP request, or anything else that our application needs to do. We define these tasks by placing the code inside either a function or a closure and adding it to a dispatch queue.

GCD provides three types of dispatch queues...