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.NET has had runtime-wide thread pools since its inception. Unless there's something fundamental about GCD that I'm missing, that puts Windows at least 7 years

.NET has had runtime-wide thread pools since its inception. Unless there's something fundamental about GCD that I'm missing, that puts Windows at least 7 years ahead of OSX on this count.

rbanffy 17y ago
Well... Java had them (in almost every OS it ran on) since day 1 too. That puts it a couple years ahead of .NET
- prospero 17y ago
  Sure. I'm not trying to say that Windows was ahead of its time, but rather that Apple seems to be making a big deal out of a feature I'm kind of shocked they didn't already have.
  - rbanffy 17y ago
    Same here. I am astonished no student added something like this to BSD in the late 80s ;-)
- pohl 17y ago
  I think the point of GCD is that the concept is being brought down to the C, C++, and Objective-C layers, through the introduction of "blocks"... http://www.mikeash.com/?page=pyblog/friday-qa-2008-12-26.html http://www.mikeash.com/?page=pyblog/friday-qa-2008-12-26.htm... http://www.mikeash.com/?page=pyblog/friday-qa-2009-08-14-practical-blocks.html http://www.mikeash.com/?page=pyblog/friday-qa-2009-08-14-pra... I agree there's too much marketing hype surrounding GCD, but neither the CLR nor the JVM can jump through that particular hoop.
  - rbanffy 17y ago
    It's interesting. For the little I have seen (and I was only able to give it a quick glance) it includes syntactic support for multi-threading being built into their Objective-C compiler. Are they forking the Objective-C compiler?
    - wmf 17y ago
      Apple has been shipping forks of GCC forever. In the future they won't have to fork clang because they own it.
    - pohl 17y ago
      Chris Lattner's first paragraph here talks about that a bit, although it doesn't give a timeframe for when the gcc implementation will make its way back to the main distribution: http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/cfe-dev/2008-August/002670.html http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/cfe-dev/2008-August/00267... Although, there's a comment by Johannes Fortmann here that says that the code has been available in an svn repository since at least September 5, 2008: http://mooseyard.com/Jens/2008/08/blocksclosures-for-c/ http://mooseyard.com/Jens/2008/08/blocksclosures-for-c/ "If you check out the llvm-gcc svn trunk, you’ll find all the code there (you can even build your own llvm-gcc with working blocks)."
    - jdagostino 17y ago
      They are investing in heavily in llvm which they hope to replace gcc with in the future.

.NET has had runtime-wide thread pools since its inception. Unless there's something fundamental about GCD that I'm missing, that puts Windows at least 7 years ahead of OSX on this count.

rbanffy 17y ago

Well... Java had them (in almost every OS it ran on) since day 1 too. That puts it a couple years ahead of .NET

prospero 17y ago
Sure. I'm not trying to say that Windows was ahead of its time, but rather that Apple seems to be making a big deal out of a feature I'm kind of shocked they didn't already have.
- rbanffy 17y ago
  Same here. I am astonished no student added something like this to BSD in the late 80s ;-)
pohl 17y ago
I think the point of GCD is that the concept is being brought down to the C, C++, and Objective-C layers, through the introduction of "blocks"... http://www.mikeash.com/?page=pyblog/friday-qa-2008-12-26.html http://www.mikeash.com/?page=pyblog/friday-qa-2008-12-26.htm... http://www.mikeash.com/?page=pyblog/friday-qa-2009-08-14-practical-blocks.html http://www.mikeash.com/?page=pyblog/friday-qa-2009-08-14-pra... I agree there's too much marketing hype surrounding GCD, but neither the CLR nor the JVM can jump through that particular hoop.
- rbanffy 17y ago
  It's interesting. For the little I have seen (and I was only able to give it a quick glance) it includes syntactic support for multi-threading being built into their Objective-C compiler. Are they forking the Objective-C compiler?
  - wmf 17y ago
    Apple has been shipping forks of GCC forever. In the future they won't have to fork clang because they own it.
  - pohl 17y ago
    Chris Lattner's first paragraph here talks about that a bit, although it doesn't give a timeframe for when the gcc implementation will make its way back to the main distribution: http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/cfe-dev/2008-August/002670.html http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/cfe-dev/2008-August/00267... Although, there's a comment by Johannes Fortmann here that says that the code has been available in an svn repository since at least September 5, 2008: http://mooseyard.com/Jens/2008/08/blocksclosures-for-c/ http://mooseyard.com/Jens/2008/08/blocksclosures-for-c/ "If you check out the llvm-gcc svn trunk, you’ll find all the code there (you can even build your own llvm-gcc with working blocks)."
  - jdagostino 17y ago
    They are investing in heavily in llvm which they hope to replace gcc with in the future.