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A comment on Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard - Now Available (Delivery on Aug. 28th). Parent comment

Re:Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard - Now Available (Delivery on A... by prospero on Monday August 24, 2009 @02:27PM (#782870)
.NET has had runtime-wide thread pools since its inception. Unless there's something fundamental about GCD that I'm missing, that puts Windows at least 7 years ahead of OSX on this count.
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Re:Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard - Now Available (Delivery on A... by rbanffy on Monday August 24, 2009 @02:32PM (#782883)
Well... Java had them (in almost every OS it ran on) since day 1 too. That puts it a couple years ahead of .NET
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Re:Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard - Now Available (Delivery on A... by pohl on Monday August 24, 2009 @02:49PM (#782929)
I think the point of GCD is that the concept is being brought down to the C, C++, and Objective-C layers, through the introduction of "blocks"...

http://www.mikeash.com/?page=pyblog/friday-qa-2008-12-26.htm...

http://www.mikeash.com/?page=pyblog/friday-qa-2009-08-14-pra...

I agree there's too much marketing hype surrounding GCD, but neither the CLR nor the JVM can jump through that particular hoop.

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Re:Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard - Now Available (Delivery on A... by rbanffy on Monday August 24, 2009 @04:50PM (#783317)
It's interesting. For the little I have seen (and I was only able to give it a quick glance) it includes syntactic support for multi-threading being built into their Objective-C compiler.

Are they forking the Objective-C compiler?

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Re:Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard - Now Available (Delivery on A... by wmf on Monday August 24, 2009 @05:53PM (#783476)
Apple has been shipping forks of GCC forever. In the future they won't have to fork clang because they own it.
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Re:Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard - Now Available (Delivery on A... by pohl on Monday August 24, 2009 @05:56PM (#783486)
Chris Lattner's first paragraph here talks about that a bit, although it doesn't give a timeframe for when the gcc implementation will make its way back to the main distribution:

http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/cfe-dev/2008-August/00267...

Although, there's a comment by Johannes Fortmann here that says that the code has been available in an svn repository since at least September 5, 2008:

http://mooseyard.com/Jens/2008/08/blocksclosures-for-c/

"If you check out the llvm-gcc svn trunk, you’ll find all the code there (you can even build your own llvm-gcc with working blocks)."

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Re:Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard - Now Available (Delivery on A... by jdagostino on Monday August 24, 2009 @05:56PM (#783488)
They are investing in heavily in llvm which they hope to replace gcc with in the future.
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Re:Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard - Now Available (Delivery on A... by prospero on Monday August 24, 2009 @02:36PM (#782890)
Sure. I'm not trying to say that Windows was ahead of its time, but rather that Apple seems to be making a big deal out of a feature I'm kind of shocked they didn't already have.
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Re:Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard - Now Available (Delivery on A... by rbanffy on Monday August 24, 2009 @02:46PM (#782919)
Same here. I am astonished no student added something like this to BSD in the late 80s ;-)
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