Apple Freezes Snow Leopard APIs

Posted by kdawson on Monday May 11, 2009 @09:25PM from the see-you-at-the-base-camp dept.

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."

1 of 256 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

Re:Why is multicore programming so hard? by A.K.A_Magnet · 2009-05-11 22:11 · Score: 5, Informative

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.