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iOS Objective-C Basics (Retired) Advanced Objective-C Categories

Jared Watkins
Jared Watkins
10,756 Points
Posted by Jared Watkins
Jared Watkins
10,756 Points

nonatomic

So what is nonatomic? Doug said it has to do with 'threading' so does that mean it's related to processing or the CPU?

1 Answer

Stone Preston
Stone Preston
42,016 Points
Stone Preston
Stone Preston
42,016 Points

if you specify atomic (the default) only one thread can access the property at a time. nonatomic means multiple threads can access the property at the same time. Nonatomic is faster than atomic, however atomic is safer since you dont get two threads writing to the same property at the same time. it really only comes in to play when you are using multithreading. (most of the time you will just use nonatomic since its quick and if you arent writing multithreaded apps you dont have to worry about multiple threads accessing the same property)