shell, perl, performance, parallelism, profiling, etc. (was: Upgrade guidance)

[Ben Scott]

On Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 9:39 AM, Bill Ricker <bill.n1vux at gmail.com> wrote:
> MP in any language is tricky ...

  I've done very little MP work, but that has been my impression.
Fundamental to the thinking of most programmers (myself included) is
that variables won't change unless the code writes to them.

> Perl has tried a couple times to make it safe and easy, but
> MP intrinsically isn't ...

  Ah, much like security.  :)

> A shell pipe with sort in it won't be doing more than loading the
> executable / spawning the process in parallel, since the sort won't
> write until it's done reading.

  Right.  The case-in-point is, perhaps, an unusual situation.  There
aren't many forks involved, just a handful of programs, and the two
big ones can (in theory) run concurrently on the same input data set.

-- Ben