Intel Releases Threading Library Under GPL 2

littlefoo writes "Intel Software Dispatch have announced the availability of the Threading Building Blocks (TBB) template library under the GPL v2 with the run-time exception — so this previously commercial only package is now open for all the use, whether for open-source projects or commercial offerings (although they are explicitly encouraging open source use). The interface is more task-based then thread-based, but with a somewhat different view of things than, e.g. OpenMP. From the Intel release: 'Intel® Threading Building Blocks (TBB) offers a rich and complete approach to expressing parallelism in a C++ program. It is a library that helps you leverage multi-core processor performance without having to be a threading expert. Threading Building Blocks is not just a threads-replacement library. It represents a higher-level, task-based parallelism that abstracts platform details and threading mechanism for performance and scalability.'"

Comments

Looks good, but a little hampered by C++

[TomorrowPlusX]

I looked at some of the tutorials yesterday, and I believe I'm going to dip my toes in this.

But. As much as I love C++ ( and I do ) the real weakness is the lack of usable closures/lambda. The parallel_for example requires you to pass a functor to execute on ranges, which is fine, it makes sense, but since you can't define the closure in the calling-scope in C++ you end up filling your namespace with one-off function objects.

This is not a critique of TBB, but rather of C++. In java I can make an anonymous subclass within function scope. In python and hell even javascript I can make anonymous functions to pass around. But in C++ I can't, and this means that my code will be ugly.

Not that this is new news. I use Boost.thread for threading right now, and most of my functors are defined privately in class scope ( which is, at the very least, not polluting my namespace ) but it's too bad that I don't have a more elegant option in C++.

That being said, Boost.lambda makes my brain hurt a little, so my complaints are really just a tempest in a teacup. If I were smarter and could really grok C++ I could probably use Boost.Lambda and this would be a non-issue.