Snow Leopard geared for multicore future

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You do realize that...

You do realize that GCD is just a combination of 2 technologies that already existed previously on other platforms, right?

a) Apple finally added "closures", aka "anonymous methods" or "lambda expressions" to Objective-C. Other languages have had this for many many years, and it is what you need to create the "blocks" you are talking about.

b) Apple added APIs that can take these "blocks" and schedule them to be executed on different threads/cores. There are many different libraries available on other platforms that have done the same for years.

The only slight advantage Apple has is that these APIs are now provided by the OS, while in other cases they had to be used via add-on libraries. But they have no real technical advantage. Other libraries are also globally (hence system-wide) aware of other threads as well as all hardware resources, so there really is no technical advantage in Apple's case.

So I would hardly write a whole blog about how Apple is blazing a new trail when in fact all they are doing is catching up.

Posted by: Qbt   Posted on: 08/31/09  (Edited: 08/31/2009 @ 08:32) You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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