On 2009-09-01 08:15:39 -0400, Daniel Keep <[email protected]> said:
Oh sod blocks; the REAL awesome in that example is Grand Central
Dispatch. For those who don't know, it's a parallelism framework that
lets you farm off tasks to thread pools, with a few neat additions:
1) you can express dependencies and
2) the thread pools are managed by the OS itself, so it can load-balance.
And they're dead easy to use. Want an asynchronous foreach loop on the
global system task queue? Here you go:
dispatch_apply(count, dispatch_get_global_queue(0, 0), ^(size_t i) {
results[i] = do_work(data, i);
});
I wonder how you could do the above in D2. I mean, assuming there's a
way to declare a C function taking a block argument and that you can
prevent prevent the garbage collector from deallocating the
heap-allocated function frame once it's given to 'dispatch_apply',
"results" would need to be a shared variable (using unnecessary atomic
operations?), and the heap-allocated function frame would also need to
be "shared" since it's given to another thread. Can this work?
Plus, they have OpenCL. I've seen about a half dozen OpenCL examples
specifically for non-Mac machines, but none bother to tell you how to
actually GET an OpenCL implementation, or if they're even available. *sigh*
OpenCL is Apple's baby, no wonder they're a little ahead in their
implementation. Just be pacient, I'm sure others will appear soon.
--
Michel Fortin
[email protected]
http://michelf.com/
