In a surprising move, Apple goes open source on Grand Central Dispatch:
Despite being a unique, key marketing feature of Snow Leopard, Apple has decided to open the code behind Grand Central Dispatch under the liberal Apache 2.0 license.
Snow Leopard’s new Grand Central Dispatch feature, which serves as a system-wide mechanism for managing parallel task execution across multiple processor cores for developers, involves multiple components in the operating system.
The user-space implementation of the Grand Central Dispatch services API, called libdispatch, has been delivered as its own open source project, joining with other components that are part of projects Apple has already designated as open, including the kernel components in the Darwin OS XNU kernel and the blocks runtime that is part of the LLVM project.
Apple’s code giveaway was “something of a surprise,” according to MacResearch, a website covering the use of Apple technologies in the scientific research community, because the new feature of Snow Leopard “could be seen to give Apple a competitive edge in the new world of multi-core.” (Source: Apple Insider)
