Any experiences with Intel's Threading Building Blocks? [closed]

Answer 1

I've looked into TBB but never used it in a project. I saw no advantages (for my purposes) over ZThread. A brief and somewhat dated overview can be found here.

It's fairly complete with several thread dispatch options, all the usual synchronization classes and a very handy exception based thread "interrupt" mechanism . It's easily extendable, well written and documented. I've used it on 20+ projects.
It also plays nice with any *NIX that supports POSIX threads as well as Windows.

Worth a look.

Answer 2

The Threading Building Blocks (TBB) in the open source version, (there is a new commercial version, $299, don't know the differences yet) is GNU General Public License version 2 with a so-called “Runtime Exception” (that is specific to the use only on creating free software.) I've seen other Runtime Exceptions that attempt to approach LGPL but enabling comercial use and static linking this is not the case.

According to this question threading building blocks is usable without copy-left restrictions with commercial use.

Answer 3

I'm not doing numerical computing but I work with data mining (think clustering and classification), and our workloads are probably similar: all the data is static and you have it at the beginning of the program. I have briefly investigated Intel's TBB and found them overkill for my needs. After starting with raw pthread-based code, I switched to OPENMP and got the right mix between readability and performance.

Answer 4

I have used TBB briefly, and will probably use it more in the future. I liked using it, most importantly because you dont have to deal with macros/extensions of C++, but remain within the language. Also its pretty portable. I have used it on both windows and linux. One thing though: it is difficult to work with threads using TBB, you would have to think in terms of tasks (which is actually a good thing). Intel TBB would not support your use of bare locks (it will make this tedious). But overall, this is my preliminary experience.

I'd also recommend having a look at openMP 3 too.