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> Apple chose vendor lock-in with Grand Central Dispatch I will note here that this vendor lock-in is one of the (if not the) main reasons Apple et al. moved a
by trelane 3y ago
> Apple chose vendor lock-in with Grand Central Dispatch
I will note here that this vendor lock-in is one of the (if not the) main reasons Apple et al. moved away from the GPLed GCC.
The ability to lock in users is the central difference between open source and Free Software.
As such, this is WAI from the Open Source perspective.
- cpgxiii 3y agoThis isn't necessarily a free software versus open source issue. Apple could have just as easily continued to ship a GCC version with OpenMP disabled. Sure you could build your own with-OpenMP GCC from source, just like you can build MacOS-compatible upstream Clang from source now. But third-party dev tools will always be a pain and an additional barrier to use. There are a couple of notable examples of major software shipping OpenMP-using code on MacOS, namely R and Matlab, but the structure of these projects means that few of their users have to encounter the complexity of getting an OpenMP-supporting toolchain working. Not so easy for a library author where nearly all of your users will need to use a special toolchain.
- trelane 3y ago> Apple could have just as easily continued to ship a GCC version with OpenMP disabled. Sure, and one of their users could have distributed a version that put it back in.