Intel TBB goes Open Source
Intel has open sourced (GPL2) the Threading Building Blocks – a library for for multi-core parallelism support.
An interesting quote from A. Stepanov (found in the interview with J. Erickson of Intel) captured my attention: “Threading Building Blocks… could become a basis for the concurrency dimension of the C++ standard library.” Coming from someone of Stepanov caliber, such a statement has weight. It may be too late in the process for C++09, but his proposals are known to make it in last minute and then work extremely well for years 
.
Not surprisingly, Erickson points out two frequent request they get from (potential) users:
- Make it available on more operating systems, more processors, and all C++ compilers.
- The need to be comfortable that TBB will be available forever.
It is GPL. How times have changed. Intel the only vendor still charging for a c/c++ compiler is releasing a key library as open source. If this was 7 years ago, you would be looking at thousands of dollars for a site license
Comment by paschal on July 25, 2007, 19:48
It is GPL, so it’s basically useless (GPL is an extremely crappy license for a library).
Comment by Ville Vainio on August 2, 2007, 12:21
Things can and do change. POCO used to be GPL, too.
Comment by alex on August 2, 2007, 12:36
<nitpicking>Not exactly GPL; the original POCO license was similar to the Sleepycat license.</nitpicking>
Comment by guenter on August 3, 2007, 13:20