Grand Central Dispatch versus Cilk++

Question

Anybody have any thoughts on Grand Central Dispatch (which has now been open-sourced by Apple) and Cilk++? Comparisons/contrasts? Is Cilk more Windows-only?

Answer 1

The big innovation with GCD is that it includes kernel-level parallelism. There are a lot of parallelism libraries and parallel programming languages, but that is all application-level support. Rather than sticking a bunch of threads in a process into a pool and splitting them up among the processors, GCD has a shared pool of threads from throughout the entire system.

Answer 2

An ancillary benefit, aside from the task-level parallelism, which I use in all sorts of *NIXes is the blocks runtime, which I use extensively in ObjC and straight C code. C is such a nice language anyways; to give it higher-order functions is like a gift from god ;)