tbb

TBB, or Intel Threading Building Blocks, is a cross-platform, open-source C++ library that introduces a task-based parallelism model to simplify writing scalable multithreaded applications. It provides a high-level set of abstractions for exploiting multi-core processors while minimizing thread management overhead. Central to TBB is a scalable task scheduler that uses work stealing to balance load among threads, enabling fine-grained parallelism without explicit thread creation.

TBB offers parallel algorithms, including parallel_for, parallel_for_each, parallel_reduce, and parallel_sort, as well as a flow graph API for composing asynchronous pipelines. It also provides concurrent containers such as concurrent_queue, concurrent_vector, and concurrent_hash_map, and a scalable memory allocator to reduce contention on allocators in multithreaded environments.

The library is designed to integrate with standard C++ code and supports modern C++ standards. It is distributed under a permissive open-source license (as of recent releases, Apache License 2.0), and is maintained by the community with Intel contributing to ongoing development. TBB is commonly used in domains requiring high-throughput parallelism, including game engines, multimedia processing, simulations, and large-scale data processing, where it helps utilize available cores efficiently without manual thread management.

Usage typically involves including the TBB headers, linking against the TBB runtime, and replacing traditional loops with TBB parallel constructs or constructing flow graphs for complex pipelines. TBB remains a widely used alternative to other parallel programming frameworks such as OpenMP and Cilk.