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: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: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: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.