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

Why is multicore programming so hard?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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

Re:Why is multicore programming so hard?

[Trepidity]

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.

Only partly true. Even in pure functional languages like Haskell, the functional-programming dream of automatic parallelization is nowhere near here yet; in theory the compiler could just run a bunch of thunks of code in parallel, or speculatively, or whatever it wants, but in practice the overhead of figuring out which are worth splitting up has doomed all the efforts so far. It does make some kinds of programmer-specific parallelism easier; probably the most interesting experiments in that direction, IMO, is Clojure's concurrency primitives (Clojure's a Lisp-derived language with immutable data types, targeting the JVM).

Lisp, FWIW, doesn't necessarily privilege immutable data structures, and isn't even necessarily used in a functional-programming style; "Lisp" without qualifiers often means Common Lisp, in which it's very common to use mutable data structures and imperative code.

Re:Why is multicore programming so hard?

[Lumpy]

only the CRAPPY video cards use any of the main memory. Honestly, with how cheap real video cards are I cant believe anyone would intentionally use a memory sharing video card.

It's like the junk winmodems of yore. DONT BUY THEM.

Living in the past

[Cheech Wizard]

Alas, as when Apple stopped putting floppy drives in Macs, others followed. Those who wish to stay with old technology have that choice. I think I have a buggy whip here if you need one... ;)

Re:Living in the past

[Ash-Fox]

Alas, as when Apple stopped putting floppy drives in Macs, others followed.

Not really, PCs had disk drives for many more years. It was only when DVD writers became standards did it stop appearing in models.

Also, what other PC manufacturers even use PPC?

Re:Living in the past

[Hurricane78]

Just tell me this: How is an average user without a DVD/CD drive going to install an OS? Even I have problems with this, and I am pretty experienced.
(Booting from an USB stick never quite worked. Also I already need the one that I have, as a keyfile storage.)

Re:Living in the past

[Anonymous Coward]

The Rewritable CD drive is not what killed off the floppy. The USB stick did.

Re:Living in the past

[DECS]

No you're thinking of the Zune.

The MacBook Air is very popular, even though it costs a lot. People pay extra for "cool, sexy" Mac products (those are Microsoft's words used in its advertising about how cheap low end generic PCs are).

Actually I'm surprised by how many starving student types I see with an Air. I decided against buying one (which would have come in handy while traveling), but apparently the cool kids buy what they like, not what they "can afford."

They also buy expensive skinny jeans and $400 iPod touches and other stuff that Microsoft billionaires don't seem to think that they will. Of course, there are people who like to "save money," who go out and buy $700 PCs and then spend thousands of dollars putting GPU cards in them every six months to play the latest PC game.

And then there are those guys who saved money buying the Xbox 360 because it was so much cheaper than the PS3, except that it was only cheaper because it left off a lot of things like wireless and a hard drive. Plus they got a great deal on HD-DVD! And they ended up saving 80% on the Zune after it tanked and Microsoft dumped the extras on the market in a fire sale.

Microsoft is all about saving money! Except for the whole thing about Vista costing more than XP, and introducing a whole bunch of new licensing levels to force generic PC users to pay for features through software upgrades that "unlock" features for hundreds of dollars.

But yeah, your joke about there being two Zunes was funny stuff man, we should get together and play Halo in your mom's basement.

Re:Why rush to use all the cores?

[DaleGlass]

That only works because you have few cores.

Once we get to the point where a consumer desktop has 32 cores, you're not going to be able to use even half of that CPU by running independent tasks simultaneously. You'll need to have apps that can take advantage of many cores. The more cores you have, the more power a single core application fails to take advantage of.

Re:Any details on Grand Central?

[Raffaello]

double bind here. those who speak do not know. those who know do not speak - they're under NDA.

How to break the 0.05 Mbps barrier in rural areas?

[tepples]

The same thing that happened to audio cds is going to happen to dvd. They will become obsolete as long as bandwidth keeps increasing.

A lot of people still can't get more than 0.05 Mbps dial-up. What, apart from a government-sponsored program analogous to rural electrification (started 1936 in the United States), is going to increase bandwidth to bufftuck nowhere?

Re:Higher Standards

[Phroggy]

I'm sure it won't.

I tried upgrading to Leopard on my G4 iBook. Tried it for a couple months, then downgraded back to Tiger.

Some of the UI decisions they made in Leopard, like folders in the Dock that display as all of their contents stacked in a pile instead of a folder icon, were completely brain-dead. There was enough public outcry (and third-party workarounds) that Apple added options to fix the behavior in newer versions, but they still go with the stupid options by default. Did they forget to do usability testing, or did they simply ignore the results? Did it not occur to them that when you've got four dozen items in your Applications folder, making the folder look almost like the Address Book is confusing? Or that a distant star shining through a transparent menubar looks like something's wrong with your screen?

Other problems I noticed:

• CUPS browsing is disabled by default
• Editing multiple items in iCal is more awkward; they fixed part of it, but the details appear in a popup instead of a sidebar so they're always in a different part of the screen depending on what you're editing
• Spotlight's "Show All" function doesn't group the results by categories
• The selected tab in an application like X-Chat turns gray whenever another window has focus, so you can't see which tab was selected

Also, I think getting rid of the rounded corners was a terrible choice. I found a hack that brings them back if you want.

I also ran into driver issues - I couldn't get my Canon scanner to work, and couldn't communicate with my Nokia phone over Bluetooth. It reminded me of Vista users complaining about their driver woes.

Then there are UI problems with Tiger that Leopard simply left unchanged:

• FTP still doesn't work (try ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/ for example)
• Windows like Spotlight's "Show All" search results window aren't associated with any application, so Cmd-Tab won't switch to them; in Leopard the "Add Printer" window has this problem too

I don't see how Snow Leopard could be worse.

Re:Why would my Mom upgrade to Snow Leopard?

[yabos]

Your mom will upgrade when new software requires Snow Leopard. Mac developers are pretty quick to adopt new APIs since they are usually making things really easy to do compared to the previous OS(such as Core Animation, Core Audio/Video etc.)

Re:Why would my Mom upgrade to Snow Leopard?

[Homer1946]

My impression of most Apple users is that they want not to use Microsoft products and do hide inside an elitist little club where there is no need for most of them to be concerned about technical issues. That's fine if that is what they want but those same people should not try to argue with people who do know what they are talking about when it comes to OSes - at least, in my case, when it comes to UNIX, Linux or Windows.

Most Apple people I know are very knowledgeable about other operating systems and make informed choices to use Macs. What does drive us nuts are those who criticize our choices but also freely admit...

I don't use Apple.

and

I know nothing about OSX.