Glossary

Term	Meaning
ARC	Automatic Reference Counting — Swift's deterministic memory management
Actor	Reference type guaranteeing serialised access to its own state
AsyncSequence	A sequence whose elements arrive over time
Buffer	A chunk of consecutive audio frames
Constrained decoding	Masking invalid tokens during generation to force schema-valid output
Context window	Max tokens a model session can hold at once
Entitlement	Signed permission granting a specific sandbox exception
Gatekeeper	macOS check that apps are signed and notarized before first launch
Global actor	An actor with one shared instance — @MainActor is the main thread
Hardened runtime	Runtime protections required for notarization
Notarization	Apple's automated malware scan, producing a ticket
Opaque type	some View — a specific type the compiler knows and you don't spell out
Optional	T? — a value that may be absent, must be unwrapped
Quantization	Reducing model weight precision to shrink memory footprint
Retain cycle	Mutual strong references that can never be freed
RMS	Root mean square — perceptually accurate loudness measure
Sendable	Protocol marking a type safe to pass across threads
Structured concurrency	Tasks form a tree; cancellation propagates, parents await children
Tap (audio)	Non-destructive observer on an audio node
TCC	Transparency, Consent, Control — macOS permission system
Token	Subword unit a language model actually processes
Volatile result	Provisional transcription that may be revised by later context

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Where to go next

Read Module 1 and skim Module 2 before your first build. Come back to Modules 3 and 5 the first time the compiler says something about actors or your overlay lands on the wrong monitor. Module 8 is the one to reread once the app works, because that's where the product actually lives.