5 comments

  • cbm-vic-20 27 minutes ago
    Should have been titled "Is Parallel Programming What Can You Hard, And, If So, Do About It?"
    • ozarkerD 15 minutes ago
      world! hello
    • igsomething 7 minutes ago
      I do agree with your comment.

      not not

  • criddell 32 minutes ago
    This review seems to equate parallelism and concurrency as the same thing and they are not.

    As I understand it, the parallelism is about task execution and concurrency is about task structure. Or, as Rob Pike said:

    "Concurrency is about dealing with lots of things at once. Parallelism is about doing lots of things at once."

    He said that in his *Concurrency is not Parallelism" talk.

    • Jtsummers 12 minutes ago
      That's a useful interpretation of the two terms, but it's far from universal and the two have often been used fairly interchangeably over the decades. It's been much more useful as a distinction when someone discussing it announces that that is how they're separating the two concepts, instead of trying to force other people to adopt that particular pair of definitions.
    • ahelwer 11 minutes ago
      That battle has unfortunately been lost and different sources give different definitions, often exactly swapped. This was discussed in one of the HN posts linked in the article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36318280

      In the end I don't think it is too much of an issue. What confusion is really brought by conflating parallelism and concurrency? Sure, concurrent programs can be serialized onto a single core (that's how deterministic simulation testing implementations like Antithesis and record & replay implementations like Mozilla's rr operate). But there isn't some deep conceptual unlock you get by having a strict conceptual boundary between concurrency and parallelism.

  • thomasahle 36 minutes ago
    Parallel programming is a great application for LLM correctness proofs in Lean.

    You can't unit test your way out, but if you care about the code's correctness, today there's a way.

    • tintor 30 minutes ago
      Mix of different types of tests helps.

      Best examples are SQLite and Jepsen test suites for dbms engines.

      https://jepsen.io/

  • kazinator 1 hour ago
    Nope! Parallel programming is all yahoo, wee, look at that go!

    Then comes the parallel debugging.

    Pretty soon it's 15 years later, different person, yahoo-wee bro having long moved on.