Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 11th Jun 2008 23:37 UTC
We're continuing our detailed coverage of all the bits and pieces dripping from the Worldwide Developers Conference in San Fransisco. As you all might recall, Apple bought a chip company called P.A. Semi not too long ago, a maker of low-power PowerPC chips, fuelling rumours Apple might use them in its own products such as the iPhone and iPod. This has now been confirmed by His Steveness himself.
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Member since:
2005-07-07
For instance, how does it compare to Intel's Thread Building Blocks library (www.threadingbuildingblocks.org), which was open sourced (GPLv2) last year? It is described as "C++ template library that simplifies the development of software applications running in parallel."
Apple has not released any information on OpenCL, which I find rather amusing for something touted as "open"
Intel's threading building blocks would not be suitable for general OS X development. While it is a nice library, it is too reliance on templates and it borrows heavily from the STL. That's a really good thing, if you're targeting C++ developers. Since the majority of development under OS X is in Objective-C*, that's not very useful.
Because of that, OpenCL has to be C based. In fact, I'm going to guess it's just a C library and if they manage to do in C what Intel have done in C++, that's still going to be very useful. Not everyone uses C++ and language bindings (for Python, Perl, etc) are a lot easier to write for C libraries.
*You can use C++ code in Objective-C++ but it's not that common as it's very complex.