Apple open sources Grand Central Dispatch API
Can you imagine Microsoft open sourcing a marquis feature of its latest operating system, a key technology that could revolutionize multiprocessor multicore computing? There are days when Apple’s just as evil as the next big company and then there are days like today.
Thereupon, MacOS Forge, those socialist bastards of Mac development (probably voted for Obama), have let us know that a libdispatch project covering Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) is now available and they hint pretty heavily that this technology is portable to “other platforms.”
Here’s a bit of spin Apple’s techno spin on Grand Central Dispatch:
More cores, not faster clock speeds, drive performance increases in today’s processors. Grand Central Dispatch takes full advantage by making all of Mac OS X multicore aware and optimizing it for allocating tasks across multiple cores and processors. Grand Central Dispatch also makes it much easier for developers to create programs that squeeze every last drop of power from multicore systems.
In addition to 64 bit and GCD, Apple’s also pushing OpenCL, a technology to leverage unused GPU clock cycles it created in conjunction with nVidia and others. This technology has also been made available to the open source community.
A crowd sourced world…
Although open source purists will whinge that Apple keeps a grip on key elements of operating system and application open source projects — WebKit (Safari), BSD (OS X), OpenGL, etc — the company is way out in front of the commercial software industry in general.
So, is Apple’s mixed proprietary + open source software development model just about right, too restrictive or is the Cupertino, California-based maker of everything worth having simply giving away too much? I’m thinking they’re doing a good job in general, but need to do more to make sure key technologies take in the public domain, especially as relates to the Web…
What’s your take?
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