I'm pretty sure that I'm on the Commercially Aligned release (the version of TBB that I'm using is actually packaged together with the Intel Compiler, version 11.083 that I purchased). I too have noticed that a few things have changed:
In the development release: 1) There don't seem to be null_rw_mutex / null_mutex in the 2) There seems to be the new concurrent_bounded_queue.
Can anyone comment on the state of #1, the null mutexes? I rather like this concept. Also, does anyone have any performance characteristics to compare the bounded queue versus the older queue?
It really does depend upon the nature of the change. The development release is an easy way to push out bug fixes as well as half-baked features (OK, 3/4-baked. They're usually in pretty good shape ;-). Some changes may go straight to a stable/commercial release (especially if there is a demand for them) while others may languish in the development release until enough experience and/or commentary can be gathered or improvements incorporated to justify a wider distribution. And as you noticed, the development release can provide a glimse of where TBB is headed: internal restructuring to improve the scheduler and to prepare for new mechanisms for managing threads as a process-level resource may already be in progress. Other than a little trouble with L-value references in the parallel_invoke implementation, I've been able to use the latest development release without apparent difficulties, which is what I've generally found with the development release. And eventually those features/fixes make it into the other releases and availability to a wider audience.
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