Locking in Swift is essential for managing concurrency and synchronization to prevent data corruption and race conditions.
Best practices include locking resources in a consistent order to avoid deadlocks and not overusing locks to prevent performance issues.
Swift provides various locking mechanisms like NSLock, Grand Central Dispatch with serial queues, semaphores, and low-level locking primitives for efficient concurrency management.
While Swift doesn't have a native @synchronized keyword, similar behavior can be achieved using NSRecursiveLock for nested locked blocks, emphasizing the importance of using locks judiciously.