Grand Central Dispatch Now Open Source

Apple has now released some parts of Snow Leopard’s new Grand Central Dispatch feature, making them open source via the Apache license. This move can really only benefit Apple, Mac Research points out. Any new developments made through this release will directly benefit the Mac platform, either now or in the future. The more developers that work Grand Central Dispatch into their code, the better, as this means more applications optimized for Snow Leopard. Apple has nothing to fear from Microsoft in this case, as any benefits from this release will only effect the UNIX community.

This leads to what is perhaps a more important consideration for Apple, that allowing Grand Central to be ported to other UNIX/Linux systems will encourage its use. Until today, it would have been very unlikely that any new UNIX tools would be developed on Mac OS X using Grand Central, simply because they would only run on the Mac. With the possibility that Grand Central will become available on other UNIX systems, the likelihood that Grand Central will be incorporated into command line tools is greatly increased.

For those of you who don’t know, Grand Central Dispatch is an underlying technology in Snow Leopard that allows all applications (or at least those that support GCD) to take full advantage of multi-core processors. This leads (or will lead) to notable speed enhancements in many of the applications you use every day. As soon as application developers begin to support it, that is.