[swift-evolution] [SE-0088] Dispatch API names

[Matt Wright]

> On Jun 20, 2016, at 5:50 PM, Darren Mo via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
> 
> SE-0088 was accepted with revisions a month ago. However, some of the APIs just don’t feel right to me. I’ve only used DispatchQueue and DispatchSource so far, so I will only comment on those.
> 
> DispatchQueue.async(execute:) and DispatchQueue.sync(execute:)
> --------------------------------------------------------------
> The lack of verb in the base name bothers me. The API Design Guidelines say “methods with side-effects should read as imperative verb phrases”. You could argue that the argument label “execute” serves as the verb. However, .async and .sync are most commonly used with trailing closures where the argument label is not present.
> 
> This issue was brought up during the review, but I did not see it being addressed. Why not name the methods something like .executeAsync(_:) and .executeSync(_:)?
> 
> DispatchQueue.after(when:execute:)
> ----------------------------------
> This one simply doesn’t read grammatically. For example, `queue.after(when: .now) { … }` becomes “queue, after when now …”. Since dispatch_after is semantically just an extended version of dispatch_async (I think), we can name this .executeAsync(after:_:).

I replied to messages out of order but I agree, moving `.after` onto .async seems like the more natural place for it to live.

> 
> DispatchSource subclass names
> -----------------------------
> Why is it DispatchSourceMemoryPressure instead of MemoryPressureDispatchSource? I don’t think I’ve ever seen subclass names where the superclass part is at the beginning of the name.

I’m not so keen to remove the Dispatch prefix from the front of the source types, given that we avoided doing that for the remainder of the module.

> 
> DispatchSource factory methods
> ------------------------------
> e.g. DispatchSource.read(fileDescriptor:queue:). The API Design Guidelines mandate that factory methods begin with the prefix “make”. Indeed, DispatchSource.read might mislead people to think that a read will be performed by this method. A better name would be .makeReadSource(fileDescriptor:queue:).

Agreed, these should probably be brought into line with that guideline.

> And why are these factory methods on DispatchSource instead of initializers on the subclasses? ReadDispatchSource.init(fileDescriptor:queue:) would be way clearer.

The source types are not subclasses, due to implementation details they are protocols.

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