|
Grand Central Dispatch
Grand Central Dispatch (GCD or libdispatch), is a technology developed by Apple Inc. to optimize application support for systems with multi-core (computing), multi-core processors and other symmetric multiprocessing systems. It is an implementation of task parallelism based on the thread pool pattern. The fundamental idea is to move the management of the thread pool out of the hands of the developer, and closer to the operating system. The developer injects "work packages" into the pool oblivious of the pool's architecture. This model improves simplicity, portability and performance. GCD was first released with Mac OS X 10.6, and is also available with iOS (Apple), iOS 4 and above. The name "Grand Central Dispatch" is a reference to Grand Central Terminal. The source code for the library that provides the implementation of GCD's services, ''libdispatch'', was released by Apple under the Apache License on September 10, 2009. It has been ported to FreeBSD 8.1+, MidnightBSD 0.3+ ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Task (computing)
In computing, a task is a unit of execution or a unit of work. The term is ambiguous; precise alternative terms include ''process'', light-weight process, '' thread'' (for execution), ''step'', '' request'', or ''query'' (for work). In the adjacent diagram, there are queues of incoming work to do and outgoing completed work, and a thread pool of threads to perform this work. Either the work units themselves or the threads that perform the work can be referred to as "tasks", and these can be referred to respectively as requests/responses/threads, incoming tasks/completed tasks/threads (as illustrated), or requests/responses/tasks. Terminology In the sense of "unit of execution", in some operating systems, a task is synonymous with a process, and in others with a thread. In non-interactive execution (batch processing), a task is a unit of execution within a job, with the task itself typically a process. The term " multitasking" primarily refers to the processing sense – multip ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Anonymous Function
In computer programming, an anonymous function (function literal, lambda abstraction, lambda function, lambda expression or block) is a function definition that is not bound to an identifier. Anonymous functions are often arguments being passed to higher-order functions or used for constructing the result of a higher-order function that needs to return a function. If the function is only used once, or a limited number of times, an anonymous function may be syntactically lighter than using a named function. Anonymous functions are ubiquitous in functional programming languages and other languages with first-class functions, where they fulfil the same role for the function type as literals do for other data types. Anonymous functions originate in the work of Alonzo Church in his invention of the lambda calculus, in which all functions are anonymous, in 1936, before electronic computers. In several programming languages, anonymous functions are introduced using the keyword ''lambda' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Spinning Pinwheel
The spinning pinwheel is a type of throbber or variation of the mouse pointer used in Apple's macOS to indicate that an application is busy. Officially, the ''macOS Human Interface Guidelines'' refers to it as the spinning wait cursor, but it is also known by other names. These include but are not limited to the spinning beach ball, the spinning wheel of death, the spinning beachball of death, or the Ferris wheel of death. History A wristwatch was the first wait cursor in early versions of the classic Mac OS. Apple's HyperCard first popularised animated cursors, including a black-and-white spinning quartered circle resembling a beach ball. The beach-ball cursor was also adopted to indicate running script code in the HyperTalk-like AppleScript. The cursors could be advanced by repeated HyperTalk invocations of "set cursor to busy". Wait cursors are activated by applications performing lengthy operations. Some versions of the Apple Installer used an animated "counting hand" curs ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ars Technica
''Ars Technica'' is a website covering news and opinions in technology, science, politics, and society, created by Ken Fisher and Jon Stokes in 1998. It publishes news, reviews, and guides on issues such as computer hardware and software, science, technology policy, and video games. ''Ars Technica'' was privately owned until May 2008, when it was sold to Condé Nast Digital, the online division of Condé Nast Publications. Condé Nast purchased the site, along with two others, for $25 million and added it to the company's ''Wired'' Digital group, which also includes ''Wired'' and, formerly, Reddit. The staff mostly works from home and has offices in Boston, Chicago, London, New York City, and San Francisco. The operations of ''Ars Technica'' are funded primarily by advertising, and it has offered a paid subscription service since 2001. History Ken Fisher, who serves as the website's current editor-in-chief, and Jon Stokes created ''Ars Technica'' in 1998. Its purpose was ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Signal (computing)
Signals are standardized messages sent to a running program to trigger specific behavior, such as quitting or error handling. They are a limited form of inter-process communication (IPC), typically used in Unix, Unix-like, and other POSIX-compliant operating systems. A signal is an asynchronous notification sent to a process or to a specific thread within the same process to notify it of an event. Common uses of signals are to interrupt, suspend, terminate or kill a process. Signals originated in 1970s Bell Labs Unix and were later specified in the POSIX standard. When a signal is sent, the operating system interrupts the target process' normal flow of execution to deliver the signal. Execution can be interrupted during any non-atomic instruction. If the process has previously registered a signal handler, that routine is executed. Otherwise, the default signal handler is executed. Embedded programs may find signals useful for inter-process communications, as signals are n ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
File Descriptor
In Unix and Unix-like computer operating systems, a file descriptor (FD, less frequently fildes) is a process-unique identifier (handle) for a file or other input/output resource, such as a pipe or network socket. File descriptors typically have non-negative integer values, with negative values being reserved to indicate "no value" or error conditions. File descriptors are a part of the POSIX API. Each Unix process (except perhaps daemons) should have three standard POSIX file descriptors, corresponding to the three standard streams: Overview In the traditional implementation of Unix, file descriptors index into a per-process maintained by the kernel, that in turn indexes into a system-wide table of files opened by all processes, called the . This table records the ''mode'' with which the file (or other resource) has been opened: for reading, writing, appending, and possibly other modes. It also indexes into a third table called the inode table that describes the actual u ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Unix Domain Socket
A Unix domain socket aka UDS or IPC socket ( inter-process communication socket) is a data communications endpoint for exchanging data between processes executing on the same host operating system. It is also referred to by its address family AF_UNIX. Valid socket types in the UNIX domain are: * SOCK_STREAM (compare to TCP) – for a stream-oriented socket * SOCK_DGRAM (compare to UDP) – for a datagram-oriented socket that preserves message boundaries (as on most UNIX implementations, UNIX domain datagram sockets are always reliable and don't reorder datagrams) * SOCK_SEQPACKET (compare to SCTP) – for a sequenced-packet socket that is connection-oriented, preserves message boundaries, and delivers messages in the order that they were sent The Unix domain socket facility is a standard component of POSIX operating systems. The API for Unix domain sockets is similar to that of an Internet socket, but rather than using an underlying network protocol, all communication occurs enti ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lock (computer Science)
In computer science, a lock or mutex (from mutual exclusion) is a synchronization primitive: a mechanism that enforces limits on access to a resource when there are many threads of execution. A lock is designed to enforce a mutual exclusion concurrency control policy, and with a variety of possible methods there exists multiple unique implementations for different applications. Types Generally, locks are ''advisory locks'', where each thread cooperates by acquiring the lock before accessing the corresponding data. Some systems also implement ''mandatory locks'', where attempting unauthorized access to a locked resource will force an exception in the entity attempting to make the access. The simplest type of lock is a binary semaphore. It provides exclusive access to the locked data. Other schemes also provide shared access for reading data. Other widely implemented access modes are exclusive, intend-to-exclude and intend-to-upgrade. Another way to classify locks is by what hap ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Closure (computer Science)
In programming languages, a closure, also lexical closure or function closure, is a technique for implementing lexically scoped name binding in a language with first-class functions. Operationally, a closure is a record storing a function together with an environment. The environment is a mapping associating each free variable of the function (variables that are used locally, but defined in an enclosing scope) with the value or reference to which the name was bound when the closure was created. Unlike a plain function, a closure allows the function to access those ''captured variables'' through the closure's copies of their values or references, even when the function is invoked outside their scope. History and etymology The concept of closures was developed in the 1960s for the mechanical evaluation of expressions in the λ-calculus and was first fully implemented in 1970 as a language feature in the PAL programming language to support lexically scoped first-class functions. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Objective-C
Objective-C is a general-purpose, object-oriented programming language that adds Smalltalk-style messaging to the C programming language. Originally developed by Brad Cox and Tom Love in the early 1980s, it was selected by NeXT for its NeXTSTEP operating system. Due to Apple macOS’s direct lineage from NeXTSTEP, Objective-C was the standard programming language used, supported, and promoted by Apple for developing macOS and iOS applications (via their respective APIs, Cocoa and Cocoa Touch) until the introduction of the Swift programming language in 2014. Objective-C programs developed for non-Apple operating systems or that are not dependent on Apple's APIs may also be compiled for any platform supported by GNU GCC or LLVM/Clang. Objective-C source code 'messaging/implementation' program files usually have filename extensions, while Objective-C 'header/interface' files have extensions, the same as C header files. Objective-C++ files are denoted with a file extension. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
C (programming Language)
C (''pronounced like the letter c'') is a General-purpose language, general-purpose computer programming language. It was created in the 1970s by Dennis Ritchie, and remains very widely used and influential. By design, C's features cleanly reflect the capabilities of the targeted CPUs. It has found lasting use in operating systems, device drivers, protocol stacks, though decreasingly for application software. C is commonly used on computer architectures that range from the largest supercomputers to the smallest microcontrollers and embedded systems. A successor to the programming language B (programming language), B, C was originally developed at Bell Labs by Ritchie between 1972 and 1973 to construct utilities running on Unix. It was applied to re-implementing the kernel of the Unix operating system. During the 1980s, C gradually gained popularity. It has become one of the measuring programming language popularity, most widely used programming languages, with C compilers avail ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
