Running tasks in a Grand Central Dispatch GCD queue

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To run tasks on a dispatch queue, use the sync, async, and after methods.

To dispatch a task to a queue asynchronously:

let queue = DispatchQueue(label: "myQueueName")

queue.async {
    //do something
    
    DispatchQueue.main.async {
        //this will be called in main thread
        //any UI updates should be placed here
    }
}
// ... code here will execute immediately, before the task finished

To dispatch a task to a queue synchronously:

queue.sync {
    // Do some task
}
// ... code here will not execute until the task is finished

To dispatch a task to a queue after a certain number of seconds:

queue.asyncAfter(deadline: .now() + 3) {
    //this will be executed in a background-thread after 3 seconds
}
// ... code here will execute immediately, before the task finished

NOTE: Any updates of the user-interface should be called on the main thread! Make sure, that you put the code for UI updates inside DispatchQueue.main.async { ... }

Types of queue:

let mainQueue = dispatch_get_main_queue()
let highQueue = dispatch_get_global_queue(DISPATCH_QUEUE_PRIORITY_HIGH, 0)
let backgroundQueue = dispatch_get_global_queue(DISPATCH_QUEUE_PRIORITY_BACKGROUND, 0)

To dispatch a task to a queue asynchronously:

dispatch_async(queue) {
    // Your code run run asynchronously. Code is queued and executed 
    // at some point in the future.
}
// Code after the async block will execute immediately

To dispatch a task to a queue synchronously:

dispatch_sync(queue) {
    // Your sync code
}
// Code after the sync block will wait until the sync task finished

To dispatch a task to after a time interval (use NSEC_PER_SEC to convert seconds to nanoseconds):

dispatch_after(dispatch_time(DISPATCH_TIME_NOW, Int64(2.5 * Double(NSEC_PER_SEC))), dispatch_get_main_queue()) {
    // Code to be performed in 2.5 seconds here
}

To execute a task asynchronously and than update the UI:

dispatch_async(queue) {
    // Your time consuming code here
    dispatch_async(dispatch_get_main_queue()) {
        // Update the UI code 
    }
}

NOTE: Any updates of the user-interface should be called on the main thread! Make sure, that you put the code for UI updates inside dispatch_async(dispatch_get_main_queue()) { ... }

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