Thread safety for OSX

[nst]

Thread safety for OSX

[nst]

STTwitter uses asynchronous network requests so it can be used from main thread without slowing the main application. I'm afraid that declaring properties as 'nonatomic' would induce users in error and let them think STTwitter is supposed to be used from a background thread.

[Mazyod]

They are currently declared as nonatomic, so they aren't thread-safe. In a Mac OS project, it is very common for developers to have several running threads accessing the same resource, and in this case, the STTwitter API. This makes the properties prone to race conditions and the such. I am not really en expert, but I picked this up from best practices Mac OS programmers use vs iOS development.

[nst]

You are right when you say that STTwitter isn't thread safe. It should always be used from the main thread, as many Apple frameworks such as UIKit http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/uikit/reference/UIKit_Framework/Introduction/Introduction.html

STTwitter properties are always accessed from the main thread so they don't need to be atomic. nonatomic is faster and safe in this situation.

Using STTwitterAPIWrapper instances from background threads would raise many issues and declaring properties as atomic wouldn't be enough to fix them.

So, you can safely use STTwitter from the main thread, update your model and your UI from successBlock and errorBlock callbacks. That's how it's supposed to be used.

If you meet performance issues, tell me and I'll have a look.

[Mazyod]

I see, ok. Thank you very much.