rule-of-72/concurrentkvo

ConcurrentKVO

Classes that implement:

• A Reader/Writer Lock built using a GCD DispatchQueue.
• A KVO-compliant property.
• A concurrent, KVO-compliant property, which uses neither of the above.

Most implementations of KVO-compliant properties that use R/W locks for thread safety have a race condition.

• You can’t call willChangeValue and didChangeValue inside the barrier/write operation.
  • NSObject calls your property getter from within these calls, which causes a deadlock.
  • GCD detects this and throws an exception to terminate your app.
• But if you call willChangeValue and didChangeValue outside the barrier/write operation, you permit a race condition.
  • Other writers may interleave their KVO calls with yours, even though the write itself is protected.
  • This creates an “audit trail” of KVO notifications that doesn’t accurately reflect the true sequence of property value changes.

The ConcurrentKVO class prevents this race by sending the KVO notification from inside the barrier. It avoids deadlock by using thread-local storage to record the property value before sending the notification. The property getter checks for this, so it doesn’t need to re-enter the lock when it gets called on the same thread as a running barrier operation.

Although recursive locks are considered an anti-pattern, the NSObject implementation of KVO requires that the public getter be available for re-entrancy from within the setter, so this is unavoidable.