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.