Swift Concurrency question: I have a network client (class) that is wrapped by an actor (ModelActor for SwiftData) at a higher level, however using the network client as a property of the actor results in Sendable warnings whenever I try to call any of it's methods.
@tonyarnold But I’ll try to answer regardless. Ideally, you want to remove the boundary crossing, not make the boundary crossing ok. Many networking constructs people make actors, but their state is only accessed to drive a UI. In these cases, I think it is generally a mistake to make them actors and it just makes your life harder.
@mattiem and yet, everything in my experience says not to run network or persistence tasks on the UI thread? It seems like some really common activities are incredibly hard to reason about and do now? (Perhaps rightly in the name of safety)
@tonyarnold Your instinct is right! You have to keep the slow, synchronous work off the main thread. Try to separate thinking about work and state! Do you only ever make use of it from the MainActor?
@mattiem no, it's actually hidden behind another actor that conforms to ModelActor and marshals the responses from the network into persisted SwiftData model entities.
Most of Apple's samples and examples just interact with SwiftData from the main thread (directly from the SwiftUI View).
@tonyarnold it either needs to be an actor or Sendable. the trick is, if you make it an actor, you can only access its methods and properties from an async context. if it's Sendable, it either needs to be non-mutable, or you need to lock mutations and likely mark it @unchecked
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