GNU Parallel, where have you been all my life?

Yes of course other programming languages can do this. I was more referring to culture and idioms. The point is that tools don't support it or think about it. And that is because probably things work for most small use cases without it, and that it is a leaky abstraction - you need to change your code to support it.

Imagine a world where there were only GPUs for example - then everyone by default would be running parallel-first code, and in that imaginary world you would need to do nothing to run a series of bash commands piping into each other in parallel.

> What RMS might be saying is “we won’t seek to enforce it”. That is completely different.

If you review the thread from the top, you might find the primary question we were discussing from the start before you jumped in is whether the Parallel notice is GPL compliant. Whether Parallel’s notice is definitively and absolutely legally binding on its own and away from the GPL is a nuance you introduced, but it has been answered for all practical purposes by both Ole and RMS. It will probably never go to court or be tested by a judge, partially as a result of what Ole and RMS have said: that the notice is not a license and is not contractual.

There is no dispute about this, and because there is no dispute and because it’s not going to court, the statements by Ole and RMS are the most definitive answer we’ve got, and to date is what people are using when making and acting on decisions about Parallel usage. Both of them have said the Parallel notice complies with the GPL because the notice is not legally binding, so Ole & RMS both were saying more than GNU won’t seek to enforce Parallel’s notice. “Academic tradition” is not legally binding law, and the notice doesn’t reference any other relevant law. The notice is full of legal holes, if you insist on interpreting it as a legal contract. It was written by Ole (not a lawyer) and doesn’t define what research usage would constitute a mandatory citation, nor what happens if the user doesn’t see the notice, or if a citation is inappropriate, or if the citation is rejected by reviewers, among many other possibilities. It doesn’t take a lawyer or judge to see that the Parallel notice is not legally enforceable, and it doesn’t take a legal education to see that it’s not Ole’s intent to enforce it as a contract. He is just asking for citations, in slightly confrontational language.

It would be fair to say that a judge or court, if this issue was ever tested in court, might overrule some aspect of Ole’s or RMS’s stated intent because their language was imprecise and effectively said something different than they meant. Then again, another judge can override the first judge. There’s nothing definitive or absolute or permanent in law, regardless of whether a judges rules on it, and intent does matter in practice. Before this ever goes to court (probably never), all questions on this topic can be (and already are!) answered by non-judges, which is why it’s demonstrably not true to claim this question can only be answered in court or by a judge.

> You should not ask a programmer for a “ruling”.

RMS wasn’t acting as a programmer when he wrote the GPL, btw, nor when he opined on whether Parallel’s notice complies, so in that sense your framing is veering into the hyperbolic.

Actually, parallel is a drop in for xargs as xargs has been around longer. Parallel has a few big improvements:

* Grouped output (prevents one process from writing output in the middle of another's output) * In-order output (task a output first, task b output second even though they ran in parallel) * Better handling of special characters * Remote execution

More here: https://www.gnu.org/software/parallel/parallel_alternatives....

This is not the case I think, xargs on mac supports parallel, and does so back to 10.9 or older

Sorry but we do have computers with 256 cores. I used to have this excuse back when processors only had 4 cores. When you consider that processors lower their turbo boost frequency as you use more cores and there is overhead from synchronization, your 4 core processor may only give you a 2x performance benefit at the expense of your code becoming difficult to reason about (depending on the problem at hand). Nowadays 8 core processors are quite cheap, below 200€. At 4x performance boost and easily 12x more if you are willing to spend the money, it is definitively worth it. The caveat of course is that there aren't actually that many programs that need the full power of your processor. The most common exception is a video game that was developed for a limited number of players or even single player but then the multiplayer version of the game becomes extremely popular and you get servers with 60 or even a hundred players, way beyond what the developers planned to support. Supporting multiple cores was not a priority and then very suddenly it becomes the biggest bottleneck.

The real problem we are facing is that our programming models aren't parallel by default.

>By Moore's Law, we could have had MIPS machines with 1000 cores around 2010, and 100,000 to 1 million cores today, for under $1000.

https://corescore.store/

You can have 10000 RISC-V cores on an FPGA but nobody cares. Why? Because even a bit serial processor (that means it processes one bit per clock cycle, or 32 clock cycles for a 32 bit addition) runs into memory bandwidth limitations very quickly if you have enough of them. Main memory is very slow compared to registers and caches. The only way to utilize this many cores is by having a workload that is entirely latency bound. Your memory access pattern is perfectly unpredictable. The moment you add caching, the number of cores you can have shrinks dramatically and companies like AMD are not slimming down their CPUs, they are adding more and more cache. Their highest end processors have almost a gigabyte of cache.