README
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Parallel Letter Frequency
Count the frequency of letters in texts using parallel computation.
Parallelism is about doing things in parallel that can also be done sequentially. A common example is counting the frequency of letters. Create a function that returns the total frequency of each letter in a list of texts and that employs parallelism.
Concurrency vs Parallelism
Go supports concurrency via "goroutines"
which are started with the go keyword. It is a simple, lightweight and elegant
way to provide concurrency support and is one of the greatest strengths of the
language.
You may notice that while this exercise is called Parallel letter frequency you don't see the term "Parallel" used very often in Go. Gophers prefer to use the term Concurrent to describe the management of multiple independent goroutines ("processes" or "threads" in other language contexts). Although these terms are often used interchangeably Gophers like to be technically correct and use "concurrent" when discussing the seemingly simultaneous executions of goroutines.
While we can plan for our programs to run in parallel, and at times they may appear to run in parallel, without strict knowledge of the execution context of our code all we can guarantee is that processes will run concurrently. In other words they may be executing sequentially faster than we can distinguish but not strictly simultaneously.
For more take a look at The Go Blog's post: Concurrency is not parallelism.
Concurrency Resources
If you are new to the concurrency features in Go here are some resources to get you started. We recommend looking over these before starting this exercise:
For a really deep dive you can try the book Concurrency in Go by @kat-co.
Running the tests
To run the tests run the command go test from within the exercise directory.
If the test suite contains benchmarks, you can run these with the --bench and --benchmem
flags:
go test -v --bench . --benchmem
Keep in mind that each reviewer will run benchmarks on a different machine, with different specs, so the results from these benchmark tests may vary.
Further information
For more detailed information about the Go track, including how to get help if you're having trouble, please visit the exercism.io Go language page.
Submitting Incomplete Solutions
It's possible to submit an incomplete solution so you can see how others have completed the exercise.
Documentation
Source Files