Snow Leopard: It's Built for the Future.
delicious-monster.com
delicious-monster.com
For example, he states:
"as machines get 4 cores (processors) and then 8 and then 16, apps written for Snow Leopard and beyond will continue to be faster and faster, with no changes, while Windows programmers are going to be struggling to make their apps work at all"
This statement isn't true.
Windows, more specifically the .NET framework (and the associated compilers), has had support for thread pools, and cross-thread dispatch since 2003, and support for closures since 2008. Those features are, effectively, equivalent to grand central dispatch on the mac.
The Apple non-developer docs do indicate that there may be some scheduling improvements that might make GCD more efficient, but without any actual benchmarks between the two technologies, that claim doesn't have any basis in fact.
I'm not trying to be a shill here, but its important to point out that not everything he claims is true.
One major difference between .NET thread pools and GCD is that the former are used in a high-level, garbage collected language, while the latter are built on top of C. Call me old fashioned, but if I'm CPU bound then I'm going to explore moving the bottlenecks to C first, and THEN look into parallelism if they still aren't fast enough. GCD follows that order, .NET has it backwards. (Although I hear the JIT is pretty good, and VS supports OpenMP which is nearly as good as GCD.)
There's an argument to do things the other way: stay in the high-level regime, make things parallel and buy more hardware, but this strategy is more prevalent (and useful) on the server, rather than the desktop, and in that case going to threads is just postponing the inevitable, you need to go fully distributed.
There will always be value in good, fast serial code, and nothing is going to beat C at that in the foreseeable future.
Anyhow, after a few hiccups installing SL on my Mac Pro today (MacBook was flawless) — I can definitely notice some amazing improvements under the hood. It's really shaping up to be a pretty stellar OS.
It's great everywhere else. :)
Now I can't login to my main admin account directly. I have to login through my gfs, and then switch over to the admin account. Anytime I login straight to admin, the dock, finder/taskbar, and icons never appear. It just sits there.
I tried removing every app that starts on login, but still no lucky. Fortunately I can still access my main account by going around, but it's definitely annoying.
I rarely ever turn my computer off so it's not that much of a bother, but lingering in my mind that my computer just isn't working right. :(
I'll be interesting to see how the underlaying changes impact me, though, as everything I'm doing right now is on the JVM...
So you recommend the switch? (I was going to grab a copy tomorrow anyway, but it's always nice to get actual experience by actual users)
One caveat -- as I've heard, CS3/CS4 has some problems.
I was intending a complete reinstall anyway, so I'm cool with that.
> One caveat -- as I've heard, CS3/CS4 has some problems.
I've heard CS3 has issues as well, but given I don't use it…
The reports that Cyberduck doesn't work correctly annoys me more.
You want lftp. As far as I'm concerned, it's the One True file-transfer program. And of course it's available in MacPorts (and even if it wasn't, it builds cleanly from source on OS X anyway).
For people upgrading their MacPorts, be sure to not only grab version 1.8, but recompile your ports (if you want) so they're 64-bit.
There are Cyberduck beta's that work fine on 10.6, just hasn't been pushed to stable yet.
What would happen if you didn't switch? Would you be allowed to use the next service pack?
If we go to 2^128 or 2^256, we start moving into numbers really large numbers. I and I really large. The number of atoms in our galaxy in near 2^220.