Hi Rich, On Jun 9, 2009, at 5:57 AM, Rich Morin wrote:
Grand Central Dispatch is Apple's proposed technology for making concurrent programming easier and safer. It looks pretty cool, as far as I can tell from the somewhat fluffy discussion here:
http://images.apple.com/macosx/technology/docs/GrandCentral_TB_brief_2009060...
Hey, i resemble that remark. :-P If you're a Snow Leopard seed key holder, there's technical documentation available behind the firewall.
It's also pretty clear that any first-class development language on Mac OS X, going forward, will have to support this. Ruby has all sorts of block-based goodness already and Laurent is busily implementing JIT for MacRuby, so I speculate that GCD may well be in MacRuby's future.
Has anyone looked into this possibility, if only to the extent of sketching out what language extensions might be needed?
Yes, Laurent and I have talked about it. :-) There's a fair amount of infrastructure need to make this work efficiently, so it may take a while, but it is definitely on the roadmap. -- Ernie P.