Tornado and Grand Central Dispatch: a quick look

Posted Sep 17, 2009 11:41 UTC (Thu) by zmower (subscriber, #3005)
Parent article: Tornado and Grand Central Dispatch: a quick look

So there's another entry in the "solve the multiprocessor problem" but it only runs on MacOS and has a GPL incompatible license. Pfft.

Maybe the free software world might be better off looking towards a mature cross-platform solution that's already part of gcc? It's called the Ada runtime system (overview here). From Ada, creating a number of concurrent tasks is as easy as declaring an array of task types. Protected types (implicit locking) addresses the concurrent access problem. There are rendezvous for synchronous inter-task communication and protected types with guards for asynchronous inter-task communication.

Add in simple interfacing to C, exception handling, strong typing, OO programming, packages, a standard component library, streams and a sane generics system. Why would you use anything else? ;-)

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Tornado and Grand Central Dispatch: a quick look

Posted Sep 17, 2009 13:13 UTC (Thu) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] (1 responses)

If by "the free software world" you mean "the GNU/GPL zealot world", then please say so. Not only is GCD free software, but lots of other free software, including LLVM, is compatible with it. And lots of people are interested in LLVM and working with it.

If the majority of free software licences are GPL-incompatible, the problem is with the GPL, not with all the other licences.

As for "only runs on MacOS:" I predict that won't be true very long. And I believe that's why Apple released the source.

Tornado and Grand Central Dispatch: a quick look

Posted Sep 17, 2009 15:45 UTC (Thu) by n8willis (subscriber, #43041) [Link]

Via the mailing list, there is already an effort to port GCD to FreeBSD, I believe.

Nate