Parallel Patterns Library

The Parallel Patterns Library is a Microsoft library designed for use by native C++ developers that provides features for multicore programming.^[1] It was first bundled with Visual Studio 2010. It resembles the C++ Standard Library in style and works well with the C++11 language feature, lambdas, also introduced with Visual Studio 2010.

For example, this sequential loop:

for (int x=0; x < width; ++x)
{
    // Something parallelizable
}

Can be made into a parallel loop by replacing the for with a parallel_for:

#include <ppl.h>
// . . .
Concurrency::parallel_for (0, width, [=](int x)
{
    // Something parallelizable
});

This still requires the developer to know that the loop is parallelizable, but all the other work is done by the library.

MSDN^[2] describes the Parallel Patterns Library as an "imperative programming model that promotes scalability and ease-of-use for developing concurrent applications." It uses the Concurrency Runtime for scheduling and resource management and provides generic, type-safe algorithms and containers for use in parallel applications.