Does Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) have any viable competitors for doing multi-core projects?
This is a question asked out of curiosity. GCD has always struck me as being very cool. When I first saw it, it looked too good to be true! It's basically how easy it is to use that makes it so beautiful. Just create a C block and throw it in a queue and the OS takes care of the rest!

However, I'm wondering: Is there anything better than this available out there on other platforms? If I were to make a naive guess, it would seem to me that this would not be the case, because no other company than Apple seems to have that much control over both OS and hardware. It would seem to me that on all other platforms you would be forced to manually hand-tune stuff (such as number of threads to create, number of cores, etc.) that you don't have to do with GCD. Would my guesses be right?

Final curiosity question:

Why didn't the crowd cheer (as the Apple crowds usually do) when Apple introduced GCD in the Snow Leopard WWDC keynote? Is it because people just weren't that much familiar with multicore stuff? Or is it because it isn't really that fancy or unique after all?
Does Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) have any viable competitors for doing multi-core projects?
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This is a question asked out of curiosity. GCD has always struck me as being very cool. When I first saw it, it looked too good to be true! It's basically how easy it is to use that makes it so beautiful. Just create a C block and throw it in a queue and the OS takes care of the rest!

However, I'm wondering: Is there anything better than this available out there on other platforms? If I were to make a naive guess, it would seem to me that this would not be the case, because no other company than Apple seems to have that much control over both OS and hardware. It would seem to me that on all other platforms you would be forced to manually hand-tune stuff (such as number of threads to create, number of cores, etc.) that you don't have to do with GCD. Would my guesses be right?

Final curiosity question:

Why didn't the crowd cheer (as the Apple crowds usually do) when Apple introduced GCD in the Snow Leopard WWDC keynote? Is it because people just weren't that much familiar with multicore stuff? Or is it because it isn't really that fancy or unique after all?