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
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