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by burntsushi 1921 days ago
> You chose an embarrassingly parallel problem

Well, I mean, you chose an embarrassingly general statement to make? Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

> which most programs are not

Programs? Or problems? Who says? It's not at all obvious to me that it's true. And even if it were true, "embarrassingly parallel" problems are nowhere close to uncommon.

> When you try to parallelize a structurally complicated algorithm, the biggest issue is contention.

With respect to performance, I agree.

> How come so few people are concerned with the answers to that question and which are true, but so many people are concerned with making performance claims?

The question is itself flawed. Technology isn't fixed. We "advance" and try to do more stuff. This is not me saying, "this explains everything." Or even that "more stuff" is a good thing. This is me saying, "there's more to it than your over-simplifications."

1 comments

If you do not understand that "embarrassingly parallel" is a technical term and that it's generally understood that most programs are not easily parallelizable, there is not a discussion we can have here.
Really feels like you're just digging yourself deeper into a hole here:

Burntsushi began with "here, parallelization is beating out memory locality and optimization in its impact," but explicitly declined to generalize this the way you generalized your claim about memory.

He further pointed out that ripgrep is fast not just because of parallelization, but also because of how it handles memory.

Then you come back with "you can't always parallelize this well" (which burntsushi agreed with from the beginning) and "you also need to deal with memory" (which ripgrep does)? How is this burntsushi's problem with understanding "embarrassingly parallel" and not your problem with understanding Rust?

I agree that a discussion is difficult. Your comments are so vague and generalized that it's not clear what you're talking about at all. Bring something more specific to the table like the OP did instead of pontificating on generalities.