Parallel for

The Parallel Programming Library implements only one pattern that I haven’t talked about yet—Parallel for, a multithreaded version of a for loop. This pattern allows for very simple parallelization of loops, but this simplicity can also get you into trouble.

When you use Parallel for, you should always be very careful that you don’t run into a data sharing-trap.

For comparison purposes, the ParallelFor demo implements a normal for loop (shown as follows), which goes from 2 to 10 million, counts all prime numbers in that range, and logs the result:

const
  CHighestNumber = 10000000;
procedure TbtnParallelFor.btnForClick(Sender: TObject);
var
  count: Integer;
  i: Integer;
  sw: TStopwatch;
begin
  sw := TStopwatch.StartNew;
  count := 0;
  for i := 2 to CHighestNumber do
    if IsPrime(i) then
      Inc(count);
  ...