Parallel Programming Challenges

This cluster focuses on debates about the ease and difficulties of implementing parallelism in programming languages like Go, Rust, C, and others, including discussions on Amdahl's law, auto-parallelization, and overhead costs.

πŸ“‰ Falling 0.4x Programming Languages
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Keywords

CPU ParaSail FP MCSTL UNIX GPU lighterra.com IMO BTW lesswrong.com parallel parallelism sequential programming tasks compiler iteration code performed languages

Sample Comments

speed_spread β€’ Apr 26, 2025 β€’ View on HN

I believe it's not the language preventing it but the nature of parallel computing. The overhead of splitting up things and then reuniting them again is high enough to make trivial cases not worth it. OTOH we now have pretty good compiler autovectorization which does a lot of parallel magic if you set things right. But it's not handled at the language level either.

dmpk2k β€’ Apr 26, 2024 β€’ View on HN

Is any thought being put into adding parallelism in the future?

ilogik β€’ Feb 21, 2018 β€’ View on HN

Doesn't go also make it relatively easy to write parallel code?

weberc2 β€’ Aug 14, 2018 β€’ View on HN

You're describing a performance optimization. Yes, if you write unoptimized code, it often takes some refactoring to support the optimization. Also, Python and Ruby are proof that languages can be tremendously successful at solving a huge array of problems without shared memory parallelism in v1.0. Besides, Crystal is presumably much faster than either of these languages with a single thread, so the relative advantage of (CPU) parallelization is much less.

swiley β€’ Feb 21, 2018 β€’ View on HN

There are limits to how much parallelism will improve things, see amdahl's law.

petra β€’ May 4, 2016 β€’ View on HN

Doesn't most speed critical software fit a parallel model ?

dang β€’ Feb 19, 2023 β€’ View on HN

Related:β€œIs Parallel Programming Hard, and, If So, What Can You Do About It?” v2 Is Out - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26537298 - March 2021 (75 comments)Is parallel programming hard, and, if so, what can you do about it? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22030

InvOfSmallC β€’ Oct 16, 2019 β€’ View on HN

What is the cost of parallelism of C though?

qznc β€’ Sep 24, 2012 β€’ View on HN

If your code is limited by memory bandwidth: Why don't you use a language, which gives you more control about memory? Why do you even parallelize?

imtringued β€’ Mar 14, 2024 β€’ View on HN

You mean if compiler theorists learned about parallel processing...