this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2023
100 points (97.2% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35801 readers
1344 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] mindbleach@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

"Here's all the ways we tell people not to use parallelism."

I'm sorry, that's not fair. It's only a fraction of the ways we tell people not to use parallelism.

Multi-threading is difficult, which is why I said it's a fucking obstacle. It's the wrong model. The fact you'd try to "slap it on" is WHAT I AM TALKING ABOUT. You CANNOT just apply more cores to existing linear code. You MUST actively train people to write parallel-friendly code, even if it won't necessarily run in parallel.

Javascript is a terrible language I work with regularly, and most of the things that should be parallel aren't - and yet - it has abundant features that should be parallel. It has absorbed elements of functional programming that are excellent practice, even if for some goddamn reason they're actually executed in-order.

Fetches are single-threaded, in Javascript. I don't even know how they did that. Grabbing a webpage and then responding to an event using an inline function is somehow more rigidly linear than pre-emptive multitasking in Windows 95. But you should still write the damn things as though they're going to happen in parallel. You have no control over the order they happen in. That and some caching get you halfway around most locks.

Javascript, loathesome relic, also has vector processing. The kind insisted upon by that pedant in the other subthread, who thinks the 512-bit vector units in a modern Intel chip don't qualify, but the DSP on a Super Nintendo does. Array.forEach and Array.map really fucking ought to be parallelisable. Google could use its digital imperialism to force millions of devs to adopt better standards, just by following the spec and not processing keys in a rigid order. Bad code treating it like a simplified for-loop would break. Good code... wouldn't.

We want people to write that kind of code.

Not necessarily code that will run in parallel. Just code that could.

Workload-centric thinking is the only thing that's going to stop "let's add a little parallelism, as a treat" from producing months of needless agony. Anything else has to be dissected, warped beyond recognition, and stitched back together, with each step taking more effort than starting over from scratch, and the end result still being slow and unreadable and fragile.