concurrency - How do I atomically increment a variable in Swift?

Question

I want to be able to increment a counter atomically and I can't find any reference on how to do it.

Adding more information based on comments:

• Are you using GCD? No. I am not using GCD. Having to use a queue system to increment a number seems overkill.
• Do You understand basic thread safety? Yes I do otherwise I would not be asking about atomic increments.
• Is this variable local? No.
• Is it instance level? Yes it should be part of a single instance.

I want to do something like this:

 class Counter {
      private var mux Mutex
      private (set) value Int
      func increment (){
          mux.lock()
          value += 1
          mux.unlock()
      }
 }

Answer 1

From Low-Level Concurrency APIs:

There’s a long list of OSAtomicIncrement and OSAtomicDecrement functions that allow you to increment and decrement an integer value in an atomic way – thread safe without having to take a lock (or use queues). These can be useful if you need to increment global counters from multiple threads for statistics. If all you do is increment a global counter, the barrier-free OSAtomicIncrement versions are fine, and when there’s no contention, they’re cheap to call.

These functions work with fixed-size integers, you can choose the 32-bit or 64-bit variant depending on your needs:

class Counter {
    private (set) var value : Int32 = 0
    func increment () {
        OSAtomicIncrement32(&value)
    }
}

(Note: As Erik Aigner correctly noticed, OSAtomicIncrement32 and friends are deprecated as of macOS 10.12/iOS 10.10. Xcode 8 suggests to use functions from <stdatomic.h> instead. However that seems to be difficult, compare Swift 3: atomic_compare_exchange_strong and https://openradar.appspot.com/27161329. Therefore the following GCD-based approach seems to be the best solution now.)

Alternatively, one can use a GCD queue for synchronization. From Dispatch Queues in the "Concurrency Programming Guide":

... With dispatch queues, you could add both tasks to a serial dispatch queue to ensure that only one task modified the resource at any given time. This type of queue-based synchronization is more efficient than locks because locks always require an expensive kernel trap in both the contested and uncontested cases, whereas a dispatch queue works primarily in your application’s process space and only calls down to the kernel when absolutely necessary.

In your case that would be

// Swift 2:
class Counter {
    private var queue = dispatch_queue_create("your.queue.identifier", DISPATCH_QUEUE_SERIAL)
    private (set) var value: Int = 0

    func increment() {
        dispatch_sync(queue) {
            value += 1
        }
    }
}

// Swift 3:
class Counter {
    private var queue = DispatchQueue(label: "your.queue.identifier") 
    private (set) var value: Int = 0

    func increment() {
        queue.sync {
            value += 1
        }
    }
}

See Adding items to Swift array across multiple threads causing issues (because arrays aren't thread safe) - how do I get around that? or GCD with static functions of a struct for more sophisticated examples. This thread What advantage(s) does dispatch_sync have over @synchronized? is also very interesting.