What are the differences between Intel TBB and Microsoft PPL?

Question

I\'m planning to start \"playing\" with task-based parallelism for a cross-platform project. I wanted to use Intel Threading Building Blocks. I\'m starting with Windows and

Answer 1

TBB is a superset of PPL (as in VS2010), so it provides all PPL API plus its own APIs that PPL does not have.

Note that namespace Concurrency in VS2010 also contains APIs of Concurrency Runtime (ConcRT, on top of which PPL is built), Asynchronous Agents and etc. TBB does not have most of that, though it has some (e.g. critical_section). As an alternative to Asynchronous Agents, the recent version of TBB features the new flow graph API.

In theory, to switch from PPL to TBB, you just need to replace a path from where you take ppl.h (with TBB, the header comes in <tbbdir>/include/tbb/compat) and of course link with the TBB DLL. However in this case you will be limited to PPL API. To use the "extra" TBB API that does not exist in PPL (such as parallel_pipeline, parallel_reduce, concurrent_priority_queue and other), you need to work with TBB from the very beginning.