bjb's Journal: Adoption of Apple's Parallel Programming Technologies

Apple's release of Snow Leopard introduces three interesting technologies that are addressing a common problem we're facing today: single-threaded CPU bound applications are reaching their performance limits. OpenCL, while not original in concept, is an attempt at a standard for tapping your GPU's processing capabilities. Grand Central Dispatch, a recently open-sourced library, is an intelligent attempt at a system-wide thread pool that is easily taken advantage of by the blocks C language extension available to Snow Leopard. All of these technologies sound fantastic, but we will only benefit outside of OS X if the Windows and Linux communities embrace them. My question is what does the Slashdot community think? Will blocks be widely adopted? Will we see cross-platform code taking advantage of libgcd and OpenCL? Are there fundamental issues with the design or license that turn people off? Of course, Microsoft has already started their counterplay by introducing DirectCompute in Windows 7, so we may see another divide similar to OpenGL VS Direct3D. However, all this is at least addressing an itch that needs to be scratched.