Re: Parallelism a la make -j <n> / GNU parallel

[Ole Tange]

On Sat, May 12, 2012 at 9:34 AM, Linda Walsh <bash@tlinx.org> wrote:
>
> Ole Tange wrote:
>
>> Can you explain how that idea would differ from sem (Part of GNU
>> Parallel)?
>
>        Because gnu parallel is written in perl?  And well, writing it in
> perl.... that's near easy... did that about ... 8 years ago? in perl...
> to encode albums in FLAC or LAME -- about 35-45 seconds/album...on my old
> machine.  But perl broke the script, multiple times .. (upgrades in perl)...

I have been the maintainer of GNU Parallel for the past 11 years. It
has cost years of work to get it to work on all platforms for all
versions for all corner cases. It has never broken because of a perl
upgrade. So I am quite baffled when you say it is near easy.

Maybe you really mean that it is easy to get it to work for some
platforms for some versions for some corner cases? I will agree to
that, but I would never characterize that as production quality code.

> So am rewriting it...
>
>        Doing it in shell... that would be a 'new' challenge... ;-)

I fully understand the thrill in doing something again that has
already been done - especially if it can be done better (Case in
point: GNU Parallel vs. xargs). I also understand the concept of doing
something that has already been done - just to see if you can do it
yourself (e.g. I wrote a quine just to see if I could).

What I do not understand is wanting help to do something that has
already been done better.

In the GNU Project we have several projects that could benefit from help:
https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects/ so I would find it
wasteful to spend time doing something again - especially if the goal
is not to solve the problem better. I would encourage you to spend
your time doing something that has not been done before, or improve
existing code.


/Ole
-- 
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