iOS Library Providing An NSTimer Replacement That Supports GCD Queues

NSTimer provides an easy to use timer API, but issues arise when working with GCD.

Here’s an NSTimer replacement from Javier Soto of Mindsnacks that provides a nice simple syntax like NSTimer but doesn’t retain the target, and can be used by GCD queues thus removing the need for you to work directly with dispatch_source when you need timers for a GCD thread.

As the readme states:

The first motivation for this class was to have a type of timer that objects could own and retain, without this creating a retain cycle ( like NSTimer causes, since it retains its target ). This way you can just release the timer in the -dealloc method of the object class that owns the timer.

and..

More often than not, an object needs to create a timer and invalidate it when a certain event occurs. However, doing this when that object works with a private GCD queue gets tricky. This timer object is thread safe and doesn’t have the notion of run loop, so it can be used with GCD queues and installed / invalidated from any thread or queue.

You can find NSWeakTimer on Github here.

A nice easy timer class that works with GCD.

Original article: iOS Library Providing An NSTimer Replacement That Supports GCD Queues

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