I mistakenly interpreted the locking thread for a hanging program. The work will execute just fine without a run loop. The code in the question will run fine, and blocking the main thread until the whole group has finished.
So say chunks
contains 4 items of workload, the following code spins up 4 concurrent workers, and then waits for all of the workers to finish:
let group = DispatchGroup()
let queue = DispatchQueue(label: "", attributes: .concurrent)
for chunk in chunk {
queue.async(group: group, execute: DispatchWorkItem() {
do_work(chunk)
})
}
_ = group.wait(timeout: .distantFuture)