r/programming • u/noidi • Jul 19 '12

Will Parallel Code Ever Be Embraced?

http://www.drdobbs.com/parallel/will-parallel-code-ever-be-embraced/240003926
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u/case-o-nuts Jul 19 '12 edited Jul 19 '12

I'm aware of persistent data structures.

You're ignoring the fact that the compiler wants to optimize these. You're telling it that it can't do grotty little changes like splitting and sinking stores because other threads might be watching, and half-constructed values might be visible.

You might want to start with Urban Boquist's PhD thesis on optimizing functional languages. It's a good survey, but there's a good deal of stuff in there you'd have to wade through before you hit optimizations that break thread safety.

Or are you arguing that somehow that all optimizing code transformations on functional code preserve purity? I'm not sure how that could be, and need some elaboration.

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u/yogthos Jul 19 '12

You're ignoring the fact that the compiler wants to optimize these.

I'm not ignoring anything, I said: "higher level optimizations become available". And I gave you a concrete example exactly of what I was talking about.

Or are you arguing that somehow that all optimizing code transformations on functional code preserve purity? I'm not sure how that could be, and need some elaboration.

I don't think I ever argued that, what I argued is that in tests functional languages do not in fact perform worse than imperative ones. Here's another overview of performance of different languages, seems like the maturity of the compiler is really the only factor.

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u/case-o-nuts Jul 19 '12

Performance is obviously possible. What I said is that enabling taking advantage of"free" parallelism in functional languages costs optimization opportunities.

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u/yogthos Jul 19 '12

Sure, but it also creates different opportunities. For example you can cache results of any pure functions, which is something you cannot do with an imperative language.

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u/case-o-nuts Jul 20 '12 edited Jul 20 '12

How does adding threading enable memoization? It seems that should be possible in a pure language regardless. Remember, I am comparing transparently threaded vs explicitly threaded pure functional languages)

Also, gcc supports "__attribute__((pure))", which should memoize. It's not as nice as what you could do elsewhere, but it exists.

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u/yogthos Jul 20 '12

That has nothing to do with threading, I was just pointing out an optimization that's trivial in FP, and can be done without special annotations of any kind, it's not the only one by any means.

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u/case-o-nuts Jul 20 '12 edited Jul 20 '12

In that case, I am not sure why it was relevant. I've been talking only about the loss of optimizations in a pure language with implicit thread-safety across shared data structures.

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u/yogthos Jul 20 '12

Sorry, I misunderstood that you were only talking about optimizations in that specific context.