Grand Central Dispatch (GCD)—a technology for Apple’s Mac OS X and iOS operating systems—is a combination of extensions to the C language, an API, and a run-time library that allows application developers to identify sections of code to run in parallel. Like OpenMP, GCD manages most of the details of threading
GCD identifies extensions to the C and C++ languages known as blocks. A block is simply a self-contained unit of work. It is specified by a caret ˆ inserted in front of a pair of braces { }. A simple example of a block is shown below:
ˆ{ printf("I am a block"); }
GCD schedules blocks for run-time execution by placing them on a dispatch queue. When it removes a block from a queue, it assigns the block to an available thread from the thread pool it manages. GCD identifies two types of dispatch queues: serial and concurrent