Parallel Algorithms
The previous chapters have focused on how to introduce concurrency and asynchrony in our programs by using threads and coroutines. This chapter focuses on parallel execution of independent tasks, which is related to but distinct from concurrency.
In earlier chapters, I stressed that I prefer standard library algorithms over handcrafted for
-loops. In this chapter, you will see some great advantages of using standard library algorithms with the execution policies introduced with C++17.
This chapter is not going to go in depth into theories of parallelizing algorithms or parallel programming in general, as these subjects are far too complex to cover in a single chapter. Also, there are a multitude of books on this subject. Instead, this chapter is going to take a more practical approach and demonstrate how to extend a current C++ code base to utilize parallelism while preserving the readability of the code base. In other words, we do not want the parallelism...