Apple Open Sources Grand Central Dispatch

Posted by kdawson on Friday September 11, 2009 @01:01AM from the waitin'-for-a-train dept.

bonch writes "Apple has open sourced libdispatch, also known as Grand Central Dispatch, which is technology in Snow Leopard that makes it easier for developers to take advantage of multi-core parallelism. Kernel support is not required, but performance optimizations Apple made for supporting GCD are visible in xnu. Block support in C is required and is currently available in LLVM (note that Apple has submitted their implementation of C blocks for standardization)." Update: 09/11 15:32 GMT by KD : Drew McCormack has a post up speculating on what Apple's move means to Linux and other communities (but probably not Microsoft): "...this is also very interesting for scientific developers. It may be possible to parallelize code in the not too distant future using Grand Central Dispatch, and run that code not only on Macs, but also on clusters and supercomputers."

3 of 342 comments (clear)

Re:OK, I give up...what is it? by Gilmoure · 2009-09-11 02:21 · Score: 4, Funny

also known as Grand Central Dispatch, which is technology in Snow Leopard that makes it easier for developers to take advantage of multi-core parallelism.
They kinda' snuck that one in.

--
I drank what? -- Socrates
Re:OK, I give up...what is it? by Anonymous Coward · 2009-09-11 03:41 · Score: 0, Funny

Marketese not, please. They would describe "shit" as "carefully optimized, easy to use, disposable method to radically simplify the act of residual management".
Re:OK, I give up...what is it? by oatworm · 2009-09-11 07:10 · Score: 2, Funny

This is all running on kernel 2.6.31, right?