On Thu, Sep 3, 2009 at 12:36 PM, erik quanstrom <quanstro@quanstro.net>wrote:

> > > > Apple's using it all over the place in Snow Leopard, in all their
> native
> > > > apps to write cleaner, less manual-lock code.  At least, that's the
> claim
> > > > :-).
> > >
> > > could someone explain this to me?  i'm just missing how
> > > naming a block of code could change its locking properties.
> > >
> > >
> > The explanation is in the manual I linked to earlier in this discussion.
>  If
> > you want to see examples there's two I can think of available for
> download.
> >  One is called DispatchLife the other is DispatchFractal.
> >
> > I've looked at DispatchLife, and there's no explicit locking of state for
> > every cell being concurrently update in Conway's game of life.
>
> i can't find DispatchLife after a few minutes of googling.
> i've read the manual, and it looks like csp to me.  clearly
> i am a reprobate outside the apple reality distortion field.
>
>
Google doesn't have all the answers, I actually had to use Bing today, and
it worked... anyway here's the link to DispatchLife.

http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/samplecode/DispatchLife/


> could you explain why this isn't csp and why this can't be done
> with regular c (that is why we need the concept of an
> unnamed function pointer) and the thread library?
>

I'm actually planning to figure this stuff out a bit more and "blog" about
it, hopefully by Friday sometime (tomorrow).

I don't agree that any of this stuff is strictly needed.  One can plod along
with pthreads and do it wrong all day.  One doesn't *need* C either, I've
seen whole OSes for x86 written in assembly.

It all depends on how much crap you want to keep track of.

Dave


>
> - erik
>
>