Book review: Is parallel programming hard, and, if so, what can you do about it?

cbm-vic-20•about 2 hours ago

Should have been titled "Is Parallel Programming What Can You Hard, And, If So, Do About It?"

ozarkerD•about 2 hours ago

world! hello

igsomething•about 2 hours ago

I do agree with your comment.

not not

bolangi•19 minutes ago

The Raku language (formerly Perl 6) and its underlying VM has features to support parallel programming, concurrency and asynchrony, designed to make common cases relatively easy to code and avoid pitfalls.

Jonathan Worthington, the author of the VM and these features, has given an excellent presentation on the concepts and their implementation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpqnNCx7wVY

anonymousDan•about 1 hour ago

I would probably recommend the art of multiprocessor programming (herlihy and shavitz) as a good starting point for concurrent programming. There is also " A primer on memory consistency and cache coherence" (Nagarajan et al) if you want to get more into the interaction between memory consistency and coherence.

raheemm•39 minutes ago

Even though I'm not a programmer I really enjoyed reading this book review.

criddell•about 2 hours 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•about 2 hours 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•about 2 hours 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•about 2 hours 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•about 2 hours ago

Mix of different types of tests helps.

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

https://jepsen.io/

kazinator•about 3 hours 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.

drnick1•about 1 hour ago

What can you do about it?

Ask Claude, which has read all the existing literature on parallel programming, to make the program faster.

Book review: Is parallel programming hard, and, if so, what can you do about it?

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