“So why did they do it? Only Apple knows for sure, but there are compelling arguments for open sourcing Grand Central Dispatch, even for a commercial enterprise,” McCormack reports. “First, Apple will of course reap the rewards of any development that takes place, just as they have with WebKit. Second, it is unlikely that Grand Central would be used by any direct competitor to Apple, like Microsoft. Grand Central is more likely to be added to other UNIX and Linux systems, none of which really pose a threat to Apple’s consumer-based business.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Note: 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. More info here.
“it is unlikely that Grand Central would be used by any direct competitor to Apple, like Microsoft.”
I’m sure Microsoft employees have already quietly downloaded the source code and are now busy stealing the technology…
Google says thank you.
Very shrewd move by Apple.
The more people use Grand Central, even in non-Macs, the more useful it becomes in Macs.
This is indeed a shrewd move on Apple’s part – the full article does a good job of explaining why this move makes sense for Apple. One sample:
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.
@ Saldin – This is technology that will be difficult to “steal”, as the OS has to do a really good job of allocating resources properly to produce optimal performance. Considering the fact that Microsoft couldn’t get audio to play in Vista without severely degrading network performance, I think it’s safe to say that the various teams within Microsoft will be too busy with infighting, hack workarounds and political battles to incorporate something this far-reaching into Windows.
The idea of a “best practice” IT infrastructure is (slowly) moving from homogeneous (single-vendor) to heterogeneous (multi-vendor). Despite their own best-interest, Microsoft has done a good job at moving this transition along with proprietary standards and exorbitant per-user license fees.
Given this landscape, anything Apple can do to help Microsoft shoot themselves in the foot is a good thing. Taking GC to the open source community does just that, by raising the profile of ‘nix applications that can run better on modern multi-core platforms.
Apple benefits as the backoffice gets more and more Unix. Come to think of it, so does the backoffice.
One thing the article didn’t suggest is that if GCD remains Apple-only companies like Adobe are less likely to take advantage of it but if they can leverage their GCD development across both Mac and PC they may.
Microsoft can’t steal it because the Windows OS cannot parallel process in the manner Grand Central expects. With Windows each app developer has to develop their own parallel code whereas Grand Central expects the OS to do much of the work. Microsoft would have to rewrite the OS and get rid of the horrible registry garbage which they have shown no interest or capability in doing. Windows OS’ already scale poorly on multiple processors or cores and once Unix like OS’ get this capability Windows desktop and server OS’ will be left far behind. It won’t take long either. Apple knows this.
If you haven’t, read Jon Siracusa’s 23 page review of Snow Leopard. He covers GCD on one of two of those pages.
I literally drool waiting for his review of each OS X release – it’s like a Geekgasm.
Sorry. Jon Siracusa’s review is on Ars Technica’s website.
Windows OS’ already scale poorly on multiple processors or cores and once Unix like OS’ get this capability Windows desktop and server OS’ will be left far behind. It won’t take long either. Apple knows this.
I hope you are right DarwinOSX, if you are, this could be a very rapid pounding on Windows and it could collapse.
Well aren’t you MAC babies all proud of yourselves and your new namby-pamby open source garbage hobbling along on 30-year Unix and Unix-like OSes. I can smell the fear by the way you badmouth Windows’ superior performance, scalability and innovation. You’re jealous. And scared. Whatever.
Nothing MAC does catches on with anybody. Single-vendor solutions like Microsoft’s will forever rule the day. Buh-bye MAC.
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This is a BIG deal! I can see future potential expansion written all over GCD technology! I can see this becoming the new software standard for EVERYTHING. It’s easier for Cisco to put 2 or 3 chips in their routers and use GCD to run them– speeding up the whole box… I can see this getting added into Linux distro’s to all you’d hafta do is add more processors to the box and gett huge speed increases on really old machines.
THis could be as big, or bigger than WebKit for Apple and everyone else.
(BTW Didja notice Microsqui$h hadda use WebKit for it’s BING portal? And it got built fast, and released stable? Hmmmm Can’t release anything based on Windoze on time or stable.. but using Apple’s tools it did… Hmmmmm…..)
Just a few cents’ worth of opinions…
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