4 ms·
Oh, look, another group of people making another arbitrary distinction between these two words, which is shared by no one else. In grad school, we used concurr
by mkehrt 11y ago
Oh, look, another group of people making another arbitrary distinction between these two words, which is shared by no one else.
In grad school, we used concurrency to mean interleaved, single processor threading, while parallelism meant multiprocessor.
I've heard other people use this distinction to mean fork-join style concurrency vs. shared memory parallelism.
Can we just accept that these two words mean roughly the same thing and stop trying to get one community's niggling technical distinction to be accepted as gospel?
- hartror 11y agoI've seen this distinction made in many "communities" including Ruby, Python and Perl. Perhaps in your domain/language this distinction isn't important but it is for some of us. The patterns you use to work with concurrent vs parallel code differ, which means it is an important distinction to understand.
- mkehrt 11y agoMy claim isn't that this distinction isn't useful, it's that the terminology is a disaster, and we should find better terminology to make this distinction. There's no consistency in using these particular terms to refer to these particular meanings.