alt Hacker NewsWell, what about small CLI tools, like ripgrep and the like? Does multithreading not matter when we open a large number of files and process them? What about compilers?
Well, what about small CLI tools, like ripgrep and the like? Does multithreading not matter when we open a large number of files and process them? What about compilers?
Sure. But the more obviously parallel the problem is (visiting N files) the less compelling complex synchronization tools are.
To over explain, if you just need to make N forks of the same logic then it’s very easy to do this correctly in C. The cases where I’m going to carefully maintain shared mutable state with locking are cases where the parallelism is less efficient (Ahmdal’s law).
Java style apps that just haphazardly start threads are what rust makes safer. But that’s a category of program design I find brittle and painful.
The example you gave of a compiler is canonically implemented as multiple process making .o files from .c files, not threads.