On Sat, 24 Jul 2010, Joakim Johansson wrote:
The bulk of the work after that will be to get libkqueue robust on solaris.
I think I wouldn't be incorrect in saying that kqueue is the epicentre of GCD, and Apple's minor tweaks to the kqueue API (now also adopted in FreeBSD) were critical to its success there. The lack of kqueue or similarly capable solutions on other operating systems is the primary barrier to portability. One thing clearly missing from the current libdispatch API, possibly because kqueue on Mac OS X doesn't support it, is an async I/O interface: i.e., do this I/O and call me back when you're done, vs do this I/O and call me back if there's more data to read/can be written. Mac OS X's kqueue doesn't support POSIX async I/O as an event source, but the FreeBSD version of kqueue does. I'm actually unsure if Mac OS X supports POSIX async I/O at all, now that I think about it. In any case, it would be neat to teach GCD about that on supporting platforms. Robert