Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) is a technology developed by Apple Inc. to optimize application support for systems with multi-core processors and other symmetric multiprocessing systems. It is an implementation of task parallelism based on the thread pool pattern. It was first released with Mac OS X 10.6, and is also available with iOS 4 and above.
The name "Grand Central Dispatch" is a reference to Grand Central Terminal.
The source code for the library that provides the implementation of GCD's services, libdispatch, was released by Apple under the Apache License on September 10, 2009 It has been ported to the FreeBSD operating system, starting with FreeBSD 8.1. MidnightBSD 0.3-CURRENT includes "libdispatch" without blocks support. Linux and Solaris support are provided within the upstream trunk. In order to develop support for Windows, currently two forks exist at opensource.mlba-team.de and Github.
Read more about Grand Central Dispatch: Design, Features, Examples, Applications
Famous quotes containing the words grand and/or central:
“One would like to be grand and heroic, if one could; but if not, why try at all? One wants to be very something, very great, very heroic; or if not that, then at least very stylish and very fashionable. It is this everlasting mediocrity that bores me.”
—Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896)
“When life has been well spent, age is a loss of what it can well spare,—muscular strength, organic instincts, gross bulk, and works that belong to these. But the central wisdom, which was old in infancy, is young in fourscore years, and dropping off obstructions, leaves in happy subjects the mind purified and wise.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)