Arch Linux

uncholowapo

Member

From: US

Registered: 2009-03-29

Posts: 238

Grand Central Dispatch

Has there been any attempt to port this to linux since Apple "open-sourced" it under the Apache license? FreeBSD (I think) all ready did it. IMO it would be a great addition for the users of multicore systems, which is becoming more common now.

Ranguvar

Member

Registered: 2008-08-12

Posts: 2,563

Re: Grand Central Dispatch

Not as far as I know.  From what I've heard, GCD is so tied to Darwin that it would take much less work to simply work more on OpenMP than try to port Grand Central Dispatch.  I didn't hear that FreeBSD has GCD now (any links?), but if they do, I'd chalk that up to the fact that a significant portion of Darwin is based on FreeBSD.  In fact (I don't want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, this is just good business strategy for Apple), this might have been part of Apple's plan to open-source GCD.  Since it is so tied to their platform, they have little to "risk" by it being ported away.  Same for Darwin, while there are projects to make a FOSS Darwin distro, none have had much success.  Anyways

NOTE: Just found this reference to FreeBSD and a Linux GCD, may not be as hard as I thought.  http://lwn.net/Articles/353111/

uncholowapo

Member

From: US

Registered: 2009-03-29

Posts: 238

Re: Grand Central Dispatch

Actually I read it on the libdispatch mailing list. Right here