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Grand Central Dispatch now Open For Business

I recently gushed about Apple's new Grand Central Dispatch code at the heart of the recent Snow Leopard Mac OS X release. Good news. Apple has decided to Open Source the code under an Apache license.

Drew McCormack over at MacResearch speculates as to why in Grand Central Now Open to All | MacResearch:
There could be one last reason why Apple has taken this step: they want to use Grand Central to push the adoption of other technologies, in particular, blocks. Blocks are an extension to C which form the basis of Grand Central Dispatch. Having your operating system based on a non-standard language is not a good position to be in, and Apple would surely like to see blocks incorporated into the C language. By offering Grand Central to the broader programming community, they may be hoping it will catch on, and make the argument for incorporating blocks in the C standard that much stronger.

I agree.

The next step is for this code to be picked up in a Linux Distribution. Having simple concurrent programming, integrated tightly with C code (and C code derivatives) would be a boon to many industries looking to exploit multicore.
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Comments

  1. Greg WilliamsSeptember 23, 2009 at 5:02 AM

    Hi Brian,

    I have enjoyed your links to the Ars Technica articles re: GCD and blocks. I can finally use some of those idle cores on my Mac ;) The open source option is also pretty exciting - my guess is that the move keeps the OS-X dev community healthy since many developers are defecting to their money platform (aka iPhone).
    I trust all is well with you - I see on linked in you are now with HP - congrats. We are a big HP Blade frame customer now - (VMWare + Red Hat) - I think Solaris' days are numbered in our data center. Good luck in the new job.
    Best Regards,
    Greg

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