Omar Elsayed iOS Articles & Videos

A couple of days ago I ran into a really interesting use case: I wanted to protect a method from being called more than once at a time. You might think "actor, done" — but nope, an actor won't save you here.

Because of actor reentrancy, the moment your method hits an await and suspends, another task can sneak in and start running the same method.

I got halfway through the manager before something started to feel off. I had AsyncStreams feeding into completion handlers feeding back into delegate methods. I had bridges on top of bridges. The "modern" code I was writing was making the rest of the system harder to read, not easier.

And then it clicked: I had built a beautiful Tesla engine and was now trying to bolt it onto a horse carriage.

The article describes a horizontal ScrollView with cards of varying heights. The goal was to make all cards match the height of the tallest one. Using .frame(maxHeight: .infinity) alone caused each card to stretch to the full screen height because the HStack had no height constraint. The solution was adding .fixedSize(horizontal: false, vertical: true) to the HStack, which tells it to ignore the parent's height proposal and size itself to its ideal content height (the tallest card). The two modifiers work together: .fixedSize sets the correct container height, and .frame(maxHeight: .infinity) fills it.