Apple Freezes Snow Leopard APIs

DJRumpy writes in to alert us that Apple's new OS, Snow Leopard, is apparently nearing completion. "Apple this past weekend distributed a new beta of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard that altered the programming methods used to optimize code for multi-core Macs, telling developers they were the last programming-oriented changes planned ahead of the software's release. ...`Apple is said to have informed recipients of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard build 10A354 that it has simplified the`... APIs for working with Grand Central, a new architecture that makes it easier for developers to take advantage of Macs with multiple processing cores. This technology works by breaking complex tasks into smaller blocks, which are then`... dispatched efficiently to a Mac's available cores for faster processing."

Comments

Re:What's up with the punctuation

[noundi]

Because it's a qoute. You see there are rules to any language and one of them in the English language is regarding quoting. When you quote a source the text written must be matching every word of the source. When the quote contains unnecessary text to the topic at hand you cut out that part and replace it with three periods. This indicates that there's a piece missing from the original quote, in case e.g. someone is questioning the quote at hand. So you see quoting is not interpreting, and must be, at all times, matching every word of the source.

Turn to side B for the next lesson.

Re:Why is multicore programming so hard?

[A.K.A_Magnet]

Haven't video game programmers been doing it forever, doing some things on the CPU, some on the graphics card?

The problem is shared-memory, not multi-processor or core itself. Graphics card have dedicated memory or reserve a chunk of the main memory.

And I heard functional languages like Lisp/Haskell are good at these multi-core tasks, is that true?

It is true, because they privilege immutable data structures which are safe to access concurrently.

Re:What's up with the punctuation

[jbolden]

No ellipse is not a change to the text but a deletion from the text.

Thanks for Playing

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm one of the seed testers, and even posting anonymously, I am concerned not to violate Apple's NDA. So, I'll put it like this: I have 2 PPC machines and an Intel machine. I have only been able to get the SL builds to work on the Intel machine due, I'm pretty sure, to no fault of my own.

Re:G5?

[chabotc]

Snow Leopard is going to be the first version of Mac OS X that only runs on Intel Macs, so I'm afraid you're going to be stuck on plain old leopard