There has been a lot of talk about Apple's Snow Leopard. Some good, some bad but most of the talk has been in the middle. One of the things that is good in Snow Leopard but is not generally talked about is Grand Central Dispatch.

This handy little piece of software enables the OS to efficiently utilize multiple cores. Now OSX has always been able to handle SMP (Symmetric Multi-Processing) due to its BSD roots but it has had an issue dealing with multiple threaded applications. Yes it could handle them but not always the most efficiently.

Bring in Grand Central Dispatch to fix this problem. It allows for a very effective method for dealing with multi-threaded applications and allows OSX to finally take full advantage of Nehalem's Hyper Threading.

So why am I tell you all of this? Well because Apple has done something with GCD that they usually do not do. They have pushed it out to open source. This means that anyone can use the code base to develop applications that can take advantage of this new technology.

That is a pretty cool thing and not a normal Apple move. Maybe they are opening up finally...Nah probably not.