Apple's Grand Central Dispatch goes open source -- get at those cores, people
By Donald Melanson 
posted Sep 15th 2009 3:26PM
posted Sep 15th 2009 3:26PM
Grand Central Dispatch may not exactly be a household name to the average Apple user, but it's certainly a hot topic among developers, who may know it better as "libdispatch," and are no doubt thrilled that Apple has now made the whole thing open source. Among other things, that means developers are now able to take full advantage of multi-core processors in Snow Leopard, which obviously has some fairly big implications for applications as soon as those developers are able to get a handle on things. Know what you're doing? Just like to get in over your head? Then you can find the complete source code and other necessary information at the read link below.
[Via Slashdot]
[Via Slashdot]
It'll be a very good step for Apple if they received i7 processors. Let's see how these next 2 years play out...
Does Snow Leopard Finder take advantage of Grand Central Dispatch or only applications?
as sweet as that'd be, i hope they don't...it will make me and my MacBook Pro's 2.6GHz Intel Core 2 Duo feel very outdated. :-(
@ iClap
Just think, if they donated that money to the public education system, maybe you'd have learned how to spell "matte". You idiot.
@iClap: I... it's kinda hard to read your post. I don't know why. The text is faded, and--oh yeah, because it's pointless and would be a waste of my time.
Maybe the tech that came out to his house was named Matt and charged $49.
*shoots torpedo directly into the core*
I win! ^_^
Did you just hack a Gibson?
Will this allow Hackers to create Virus's & worms for Mac OSX?
this is a real question not sarcasm
No, it means that other Unix operating systems like FreeBSD, Linux and Solaris will be able to take advantage of the GCD innovations without having to reimplement everything in a clean-room implementation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design
maybe virgil should take a look at this website
" Just like to get in over your head?"
Why yes, yes I do.
I literally read that as "labiapatch."
Sisyphus, I have no idea where that came from. Thanks for commenting, always enjoyable.
I think its a new birth control.
And I read your name as "syphilis."
I hear "syphilis" is making a comeback cause people are letting it loose in the recession.
And the SciFi channel renamed itself to SyFy.
"syphilis" is making a comeback cause people aren't using their labiapatches.
awesome.. sounds like it's time for some crazy beachballin
*puts on some Nalin & Kane*
Welcome to the 21st century apple. We were wondering what all those wasted cores were for too.
Do you have any freaking idea wtf you are talking about, oh wait, this is engadget.
In a post about possibly one of the most awesome libraries to come around in a while going open source, its nothing but penis jokes and stupid comments by ignorant people. GJ guys.
@ tsing tao : dude, don't be such a.. dick
Holy GOD your dumb!
Threading has been in the Mac os since a very early version (way before 8, although I don't know/care to look it up), and in other oses for a very long time. Apple's big contribution is blocks, which function much like anonymous functions in very high level languages. They allow one to easily create threads in C with ease, which is quite nice. They aren't playing catch-up, nor are they introducing something that's revolutionary. It's merely a nice library to make threading in lower level languages require almost no effort, hopefully leading to developers too lazy to do the extra work in creating threads w/o libdispatch thread when it could be benificial.
"Holy GOD your dumb!"
This from a guy who can't spell "you're".
Once 64bit is taken advantage of is when people will notice the real changes from Leopard to Snow Leopard. It only gets better from here! ^_^
Or if someone ports back GCD and OpenCL to Leopard and Tiger; they're far more important than 64-bit support for most apps, and are both open source (: This would also have the nice effect of developers just having to check for libdispatch and put it into the library folder if neccesary, and not leave any of their potential customers out in the cold by requiring 10.6.
Or if someone ports back GCD and OpenCL to Leopard and Tiger; they're far more important than 64-bit support for most apps, and are both open source (: This would also have the nice effect of developers just having to check for libdispatch and put it into the library folder if neccesary, and not leave any of their potential customers out in the cold by requiring 10.6.
Or if someone ports back GCD and OpenCL to Leopard and Tiger; they're far more important than 64-bit support for most apps, and are both open source (: This would also have the nice effect of developers just having to check for libdispatch and put it into the library folder if neccesary, and not leave any of their potential customers out in the cold by requiring 10.6. 64 bit support will only markedly improve a very, very small subset of applications directly, mostly cryptographic/compression algorithms, and some VMs. Easy GPU calculations are far more important, and people threading when appropriate would always be nice.
Considering it was built on open source software it's not a surprise, much like OS X (Mach & BSD)
Except that Apple offer an OS with a well thought out user experience, simplicity that isn't just skin-deep and best of all: which doesn't involve having to compile your own drivers for the most basic pieces of hardware.
Linux is so not ready for primetime it's not even funny.
@ Dutchguy
Saying that Linux (at least the popular distros) isn't ready for prime time because you have to manually compile drivers is like saying that the iPhone sucks because it doesn't have 3g capabilities. In other words, at one point in time the statement was correct, but making it now just shows that you are out of touch with the technology.
@DutchGuy
Uh, when did Major4Play mention Linux? Axe grinding much?
So they´re now where most Unix and Linux systems have been for ages?
Shh, Apple invented open source, just like they invented phones and mp3 players. Anything said otherwise is a lie.
You have failed "Understanding Unix 101". Sorry.
So...quick question.
Does Windows 7 also have the level of multicore support that Grand Central offers with Snow Leopard???
I can't tell if you're being serious or being sarcastic...
Maybe a few years ago it did.
You could take advantage of multi-core processors back in Windows XP, Windows Vista made it easier; obviously Windows 7 will too. You didn't need some stupid library to do it either; it was dependent on which development tool you were using; but the majority provide a method to thread out to another core or processor without any real difficulty. Apple has been playing catchup for sometime now; first with 64-bit systems and they still arent fully 64-bit, and now with multicore cpu support, also with gpu being used as cpu.
Jon Graft
I'm actually being serious, dude. I'm asking this question because I'm planning to buy a computer within a few months and wanted to get more information about the performance benefits/downsides of both OSes. I may end up either getting a notebook/netbook and turning it into a hackintosh or in the less probable scenario, getting a Mac.
Once again, no sarcasm intended.
uhmmm, lets see, considering grand central dispatch is unix based, no.
PG, thanks for the informative reply.
@PG
I can't begin to tell you how many fails you wrote in that short paragraph. Grand Central Dispatch is to HELP developers write software that can take advantage of multicores, do you know how hard and annoying it is to do it, so apple created this to make the process much easier. Mac OS X has supported multi-core since 2002.
Please, jump off a very big mountain.
@AustinHwang
This article has some interesting links about performance comparisons between xp/vista/7 for multicore tasks
"As it stands, you'll need to reach into the 20- to 30-core range before the multicore efficiencies of the Vista/Windows 7 kernel finally allow the OS to overtake Windows XP in terms of raw performance."
http://www.infoworld.com/d/windows/apple-steals-microsofts-multicore-thunder-grand-central-594
OS X has supported multiple cores for ages. Grand Central isn't adding support for writing programs that run on multiple cores, it's making it easy to support running on multiple cores. Rather that try to explain Grand Central, I'll just point everybody to the excellent Ars Technica article.
http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2009/08/mac-os-x-10-6.ars
Start on page 8 for the complete rundown of what Grand Central means.
Lee - I'm a software developer. It's not hard at all to write multi-core apps, most devs are just lazy and don't bother. You really have no idea what you are talking about and just rehash what you read; that its supposedly super difficult to write multicore apps. It simply isnt true.
@PG & Lee
Jesus you people are rude.
If you're going to bash each other with "facts", perhaps try backing your information up with sources first.
Don't follow in our past president's footsteps.