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.

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?

Apple has been shipping forks of GCC forever. In the future they won't have to fork clang because they own it.

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)."

They are investing in heavily in llvm which they hope to replace gcc with in the future.

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.

Same here. I am astonished no student added something like this to BSD in the late 80s ;-)