What is Microsoft's and opensource's response to Apple's Grand Central?

[Infohawk]

According to Ars Technica, Snow Leopard is about making developers happy. One big addition to OSX is Grand Central, which makes it easier to code for multi-core processors. Does Microsoft have an answer to this? Does open source?

 

[Jeff7181]

I'm pretty sure similar technologies are already used on Windows and Linux platforms. As I understand it, GCD creates ambiguity so a developer doesn't have to code for a specific number of processing cores or specific which core which thread runs on. They simply write a multi-threaded app and the OS decides which threads are executed by which core, and can move them from core to core as necessary. To my knowledge, this is already done in Windows and Linux and has been for some time.

Granted, I'm no expert and I haven't read about GCD in detail so I could be completely wrong.

 

[ViRGE]

Microsoft's response would be the Task Parallel Library, which from my understanding is very similar to GCD. It's been in development for a few years now and various previews have been released since 2007, but Apple beat them to the punch in getting it shipped. RPL is scheduled for .Net 4.0, and I don't know when that's shipping.

 

[Nothinman]

So it's just a multi-threading library?

 

[Snapster]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
So it's just a multi-threading library?

Pretty much, except Apple has this nack of coming up with a glitzy name and marketing it (Time Machine -> Shadow Copy). From what I've seen the System.Concurrency/System.Threading library even beats thread pooling by about 5% per processor, not bad.