Apple Open Sources Grand Central Dispatch

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."

Comments

Apache and a threading framework

[RiotingPacifist]

the question is:
What license? Apache v2.0
What the fuck is GCD?

Grand Central Dispatch (GCD), named for Grand Central Terminal, is used to optimize application support for multicore processors. It is an implementation of task parallelism based on the thread pool pattern
GCD works by allowing specific tasks in a program that can be run in parallel to be demarcated as blocks.[2] To this end, it extends the syntax of C, C++, and Objective-C programming languages.[2] At runtime, the blocks are queued up for execution and depending on availability of processing resources, they are scheduled to execute on any of the available processor cores[2] (referred to as "routing" by Apple).[3]
see also
# Task Parallel Library - comparable technology in the .NET Framework developed by Microsoft.
# Java Concurrency - comparable technology in Java (also known as JSR 166).