Re: libdispatch vs glib

[Christian Hergert <chris dronelabs com>]

Hi,

Have you see my library iris[1]?

It includes a lot of the same sort of stuff (albeit not nearly the 
attention and optimization yet) and includes:

 * a work-stealing scheduler thats 8x faster than GThreadPool
   on my local machines (dual and quad-cores)
 * message-passing using ports/receivers
 * a dynamic scheduler manager that can scale threads as neaded
   and tear them back down.  applications can have multiple schedulers
   based on what they want if needed.
 * reusable lock-free data structures such as Queue, FreeList, Stack,
   and Round-Robin.
 * IrisTask which is like Twisted's Deferred for addCallback/addErrback
   type functionality.
 * iris_arbiter_coordinate() which is a reader/writer lock implemented
   asynchronously using message passing (on top of ports/receivers)
 * bindings for python, vala, and gobject-introspection (vala might be
   out of date though).
 * GMainLoop integration for scheduling callbacks in the mainloop.

One major thing it lacks

 * eyes looking at the code
 * documentation

But best of all, its written fully using GLib :-)

I wrote this during my spring/summer after I quit my job.  However I 
start a new one in a few weeks but would love some input from others and 
ideally more people to commit features and generally use it.

Cheers,

-- Christian

[1] http://git.dronelabs.com/iris

cee1 wrote:
> Hi all,
> Following is a comparison between libdispatch and glib, just for interest.
>
> First, libdispatch is the user space part of apple's GDC(Grand Central
> Dispatch), resides at http://libdispatch.macosforge.org. There is also
> an introduction at
> http://developer.apple.com/mac/articles/cocoa/introblocksgcd.html.
>
> At first glimpse, libdispatch provides three different types of dispatch
> queues:
>
>    1. Main queue: equivalent of glib's main event loop
>    2. Global queue: backed up by a thread pool. All the jobs sent to
>       this queue, will be executed in arbitrary threads asynchronously.
>    3. Private queue: jobs in this queue will be executed serially.
>
> Both private queue and main queue are just threads in global queue. It
> should be more user-friendly than combining GMainLoop and GThreadPool,
> e.g. process GSource in another thread (i.e using thread pool in the
> callback of that GSource).
>
> The private queue can be considered as a pipeline (imaging GstPipeline
> in gstreamer).
>
> libdispatch also has a type of dispatch_source_t, equivalent of GSource,
> but the callback is running in global queue, (hence, a different thread)
>
> libdispatch is built on an extension to C (blocks), which is like GClosure.
>
>
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