Pro Multithreading and Memory Management for iOS and OS X

Chapter 6

Grand Central Dispatch

In the final three chapters, we discuss Grand Central Dispatch (GCD). This new feature is introduced for OS X Snow Leopard and iOS 4 or later to help multithreaded programming. I explain it with the implementation to see how multithreaded programming would be changed.

In this chapter, we first take a glance at an example that uses GCD. We then review what multithreading is now with the benefit of GCD and how traditional multithreading programming was used prior to GCD.

Grand Central Dispatch Overview

Let’s see what Apple says about Grand Central Dispatch:

One of the technologies for starting tasks asynchronously is Grand Central Dispatch (GCD). This technology takes the thread management code you would normally ...