

Why Data Structures Matter - gnosis
http://joelneely.wordpress.com/2011/03/05/why-data-structures-matter

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spacemanaki
Previously, <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2294202>

More specifically, someone hunted down what I think is the Guy Steele talk
mentioned in the OP: [http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Thinking-Parallel-
Program...](http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Thinking-Parallel-Programming)

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peregrine
Great talk. I feel like he spent the first 18 minutes talking about his crappy
ASM code just because he did all that work and wanted to present it.

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jamieb
Is Fortress dead?

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peregrine
Sorry for jumping on this late, it is not dead.
<http://projectfortress.java.net/>

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orborde
What is the word splitting task mentioned here?

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lurker14
Not sure, but for the article's sake, "word splitting" is only relevant as it
involves (singly-linked) list concatenation as a performance bottleneck. List
concatentation is efficient when the first list is short (ideally length=1),
which is to say, a right fold that builds a list by a series of prepend
operations.

Of course, that analysis is a little weird, because if our goal is to
accumulate a large _sequence_ (O(1) to get head, O(n) full traversal) as fast
as possible, you shouldn't use a linked list at all. You should use something
like a Finger Tree, whose construction is parallelizable (that is merging two
size-n sublists is O(log n), not linked list's O(n) ).

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durandal1
Who said they didn't?

