This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Summary
This chapter looked at several ways of packaging functionality to be executed at a later time or on a different thread. Function pointers let you hand off functions but require that you provide an extra variable to go with the function pointer if you need to pass some context to go along with the function. NSInvocation objects wrap the target, the selector, and the arguments of an Objective-C message expression in a single object that can then be stored or handed off for later execution. They are easy to use but difficult to construct.
Blocks, an Apple-added extension to C, Objective-C 2.0, and C++, wrap a series of statements and the variables in their surrounding context in a single entity. Grand Central Dispatch, Apple's system for managing concurrency, uses blocks as the medium for submitting tasks to be executed on other threads. Beginning with Mac OS X Snow Leopard (v 10.6), Apple is deploying blocks throughout the Cocoa frameworks to replace older methods that used NSInvocation objects or required separate target, selector, and context arguments for callbacks.