How to dispatch on main queue synchronously without a deadlock?

Question

I need to dispatch a block on the main queue, synchronously. I don’t know if I’m currently running on the main thread or no. The naive solution looks like this:

dispatch_sync(dispatch_get_main_queue(), block);

But if I’m currently inside of a block running on the main queue, this call creates a deadlock. (The synchronous dispatch waits for the block to finish, but the block does not even start running, since we are waiting for the current one to finish.)

The obvious next step is to check for the current queue:

if (dispatch_get_current_queue() == dispatch_get_main_queue()) {
    block();
} else {
    dispatch_sync(dispatch_get_main_queue(), block);
}

This works, but it’s ugly. Before I at least hide it behind some custom function, isn’t there a better solution for this problem? I stress that I can’t afford to dispatch the block asynchronously – the app is in a situation where the asynchronously dispatched block would get executed “too late”.

Answer 1

I need to use something like this fairly regularly within my Mac and iOS applications, so I use the following helper function (originally described in this answer):

void runOnMainQueueWithoutDeadlocking(void (^block)(void))
{
    if ([NSThread isMainThread])
    {
        block();
    }
    else
    {
        dispatch_sync(dispatch_get_main_queue(), block);
    }
}

which you call via

runOnMainQueueWithoutDeadlocking(^{
    //Do stuff
});

This is pretty much the process you describe above, and I've talked to several other developers who have independently crafted something like this for themselves.

I used [NSThread isMainThread] instead of checking dispatch_get_current_queue(), because the caveats section for that function once warned against using this for identity testing and the call was deprecated in iOS 6.