On Jun 9, 2009, at 10:59 AM, Jordan K. Hubbard wrote:
On Jun 9, 2009, at 5:57 AM, Rich Morin wrote:
It's also pretty clear that any first-class development language
on Mac OS X, going forward, will have to support this. Ruby has
all sorts of block-based goodness already and Laurent is busily
implementing JIT for MacRuby, so I speculate that GCD may well be
in MacRuby's future.
Has anyone looked into this possibility, if only to the extent of
sketching out what language extensions might be needed?
Various apple folks on this list have, as one might expect, looked
into the possibility. Given that MacRuby is a cooperative project
which involves folks both inside and outside Apple, however, we need
to wait for SnowLeopard to ship before we do much more than look,
since this extending the Ruby language to better support parallelism
is something we need to discuss as a full and complete group before
making any moves. Laurent also has more than enough on his plate
just finishing up the LLVM work and we don't need him distracted by
any new shiny objects before 0.5 reaches feature parity with 0.4, at
the very least. :-) I would prefer that we focus on figuring out
what needs to be done as a prerequisite for bringing the -
experimental branch back to trunk before even considering at which
of many possible mountains we would like to climb next.
Indeed, there are a few things to do first, including the
implementation of a threading model. Threads have not been implemented
yet in the experimental branch (we keep the best for last :)).
I contemplated implementing the Thread class on top of GCD a while
ago, but the semantics of GCD and the Thread APIs don't always match
(and it would make MacRuby SL-only). So, it's better I think to have
real posix threads first, then an API to talk to GCD later. I already
started thinking about integrating GCD differently, after some
brainstorming with a few persons. I will eventually hack something but
unfortunately this won't be public until SL ships.
Laurent
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