I was about to do some basic natural language processing (NLP) task on a large text file: create a dictionary of unique words and count how many times each word occurs. Easy peasy. This should only take me a minute. So I thought. While coding did not take more than 2 zips of coffee, I needed to wait almost an hour for …

Read More

Most of our modern day computers have more than one processing unit. They are often referred to as cores. For a developer, effectively using multiple cores simultaneously to speed up program execution by parallel processing comes with challenges. One of them is changing the value of a variable in shared memory. In this …

Read More